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Gigabyte P67A-UD3R Sandy Bridge Mobo |
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Introduction, Motherboard Layout
The second Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard on our test bench is a real treat in that it's the first of GIGABYTE's P67 range of motherboards that utilises a black PCB design. This is a big change from the blue design that we've known for many, many years, but does this colour change bring with it the features and performance expected? Let's find out!
The P67A-UD3R supports the latest dual and quad core Intel Sandy Bridge processors (LGA1155). It features six SATA ports (two SATA 3.0, four SATA 2.0) with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 support, four DDR3 memory slots with support for XMP profiles, NEC's SuperSpeed USB 3.0 controller, Realtek Gigabit LAN, two PCI-Express x16 slots, allowing for 2-way CrossFireX support, all while conforming to an ATX Form Factor measuring in at 30.5cm x 24.4cm.
 
In the box we find one set of SATA cables (2 cables in total), multilingual installation instructions, a software/driver CD, GIGABYTE and Dolby Audio stickers (Dolby not pictured) as well as a user manual and I/O panel. Just the essentials required to get you up and running.
Below you can find a generic Intel H67 and P67 chipset diagram. Without going into too much depth the P67 permits overclocking on all Sandy Bridge processors and allows for a more fair PCI-Express layout when implemented, but let's not forget to mention the removal on limiting memory speeds to 1333MHz as seen with H67 based motherboards. Furthermore, no Sandy Bridge GPU-based video output is available on a P67 chipset, and for those wanting the best of both worlds you will have to wait for the unannounced Z68 chipset.
Here are the motherboard specifications as provided by GIGABYTE:
Motherboard Layout:
The GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R features a respectable set of connections including eight USB 2.0/1.1 ports, two USB 3.0/2.0 ports with blue highlights, a combo PS2 keyboard and mouse connector, and gigabit Ethernet connectivity via the onboard Realtek RTL8111E chip. There's also one coaxial and optical S/PDIF connector and a set of six analogue 3.5mm outputs driven by Realtek's ALC892 audio solution supporting 7.1 channel output and Dolby audio technologies.
The motherboard's design is fairly neat and the CPU socket area has been organised in a way as to allow the majority of popular heatsinks to be utilised without clipping the surrounding MOSFET heatsinks. Key external plugs and power connectors are easy to reach reducing the chance of cables hanging over other hardware, unfortunately the way the SATA ports are set out may cause issues when installing a second video card when using more than four out of the six available SATA ports.
 
Here are a few more shots of the motherboard:
 
 
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