P67 motherboards

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Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 Intel Motherboard

Things here in San Francisco are starting to get interesting at this year’s Intel Developers Forum (IDF) as we already saw Intel's P67 motherboard, but now we get to see what motherboard giant Gigabyte is cooking up for that chipset. Gigabyte has a pair of their next generation P67A motherboards on display here at the show and that is fitting for the situation as IDF 2010 is all about Intel's upcoming 32nm Sandy Bridge processor. Gigabyte's current generation of P55A motherboards are very popular in the enthusiast and DIY community and Gigabyte plans on keeping that pace with their new Intel P67A motherboard series. The two mainboards that they had on display were the GA-P67A-UD5 and GA-P67A-UD7. We'll start by covering the GA-P67A-UD7 since it is currently the flagship board. Without further ado here is the GA-P67A-UD7 in all its glory.

Gigabyte's current generation of P55A motherboards are very blue and this time around Gigabyte has gone with black PCB's on the P67A motherboard line. The layout of the board is very clean and the gun metal black finish on the boards passive cooling looks nice.

The first thing you notice when looking at the PCI slots is that the GA-P67A-UD7 has four PCIe x16 slots on it. Gigabyte is offering both NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire multi-GPU support on this board. This is due to the use of an NVIDIA NF200 controller that is located under one of the boards passive heat sinks. The board also features a PCIe x1 slot above the primary PCIe x16 slot and two legacy PCI slots for those that still might have a device using these slots.

The Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard has six SATA II 3.0Gbps internal headers and a pair of SATA III 6Gbps headers for those that want to use the latest and greatest SSDs and hard drives. You can also make out the LED post indicator and the color coded front panel connections in the picture above.

Gigabyte didn't mention what memory speeds would be supported on the GA-P67A-UD7, but we can see that the board has two pairs of DDR3 dual-channel memory sockets available on it.

The Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 has a 24 phase power VRM design that is said to be dual power switching. Notice the MOSFET cooler has the number 7 on it to go along with the naming of the board. Gigabyte will be using the upgraded black nickel plated LOTES LGA1155 socket on both the UD5 and UD7 motherboards.

Gigabyte was happy to point out that the heatpipe coolers on this board are secured by high quality tension screws that help increase contact pressure as pressure is important for maintaining proper contact to improve cooling. This also makes it easier to remove the factory cooling solution if the end user wants to upgrade to an improved cooling solution.

Gigabyte has color coded their P67A motherboards, so the higher end UD7 has gold accents and the UD6 has blue accents. Not only does it help distinguish what board you are looking at it also adds to the board and several Intel employees that were at the display when we were commented on how they liked the gold color.

The rear I/O panel on the GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard is has the usual connections, but notice that it has four SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports that run off a pair NEC controllers. This is a nice touch as many more USB 3.0 devices will be coming out in the months ahead and if you plan on keeping your system for a number of years, having four headers is a must if you ask us.

Gigabyte had this place card next to the GA-P67A-UD7, which included all the information they were willing to disclose at this time. With the platform not due to be released until January 2011 we are shocked that this much information is being shown.

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