Gigabyte Readies GA-P55A-UD4 with SATA 6 Gbps and USB 3.0

[btarunr]

Gigabyte is readying a new socket LGA-1156 motherboard, the GA-P55A-UD4. Bearing resemblance with the GA-P55-UD4, the motherboard features upgraded connectivity, with support for USB 3.0, and SATA 6 Gb/s. The new model also features an upgraded CPU VRM, with a 12+2 phase design compared to the 8+2 phase design on the GA-P55-UD4. USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s features are provided using additional controllers on board. A Marvell-made SATA 6 Gb/s two-port controller replaces the familiar Gigabyte GSATA2 controller, while an NEC-made controller provides two USB 3.0 ports on the rear-panel. The USB 3.0 ports are color-coded blue, and share the port cluster with the lone gigabit Ethernet connector, while the SATA 6 Gb/s connectors are color-coded white, next to the usual six SATA 3 Gb/s ones the P55 PCH provides.

The rest of the feature-set remains largely same, with four DDR3 DIMM slots to support up to 16 GB of memory, two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots (electrically x8 when both are populated) supporting ATI CrossFireX and NVIDIA SLI, Dolby Home Theater supportive onboard audio, among other standard issues. The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 will not replace GA-P55-UD4 from the market, it will coexist, albeit priced higher. It remains to be seen if this is the only "P55A" motherboard Gigabyte sells.



Source: TechConnect Magazine

[lukcic]

why intel? AMD and Seagate did SATA III and presented it....

[handsomerichguy]

Very similar to GA-P55-UD4 version

[angelkiller]

You would think that they would add these features to the high end X58 platform first.

Either way, I hope these features get widespread adoption very quickly. USB 3.0 rocks!

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

usb3 rocks?

[angelkiller]

Yeah man!

[oli_ramsay]

^ USB rocks!

[cool_recep]

Yah, and it has faulty foxconn socket

I love gigabyte but this is the truth

[OnBoard]

Originally Posted by cool_recep

Yah, and it has faulty foxconn socket

I love gigabyte but this is the truth

Share the Gigabyte love too, but interesting read. Hopefully that will get fixed with next motherboard revisions.

This motherboard looks like a candidate when I'll next upgrade (not in a while). Still remember having an AsRock board that had one of the first (if not first) sataII slots and they came handy, when I upgraded to a sataII HDD. Now that there are motherboards with the future stuff, HDD and USB devices with support for it will start popping up and getting one without these will be silly (if price increase isn't big).

[qwerty_lesh]

I heard about the EX-58A series many months ago through my GIGABYTE vendor, I'm really surprised that these have been debuted first.

I don't mind if the mainstream 1156 platform is the guinea pig first though. Just means that when I do get me an EX58A to replace my current EX58, it will be more reliable

[REVHEAD]

Originally Posted by qwerty_lesh

I heard about the EX-58A series many months ago through my GIGABYTE vendor, I'm really surprised that these have been debuted first.

I don't mind if the mainstream 1156 platform is the guinea pig first though. Just means that when I do get me an EX58A to replace my current EX58, it will be more reliable

Mine is solid as a rock, 200 qpi or 210 24/7 no dramas here.

[nebbia88]

Originally Posted by cool_recep

Yah, and it has faulty foxconn socket

I love gigabyte but this is the truth

and this is the SOLUTION

[PP Mguire]

Marvel has since fixed and improved its single disk and RAID 0 supporting SATA3 controller and now we see one of the first motherboards on the market to support the next generation storage system. At the moment, there is no RAID 1 support, but a GIGABYTE product manager mentioned in our meeting that Marvell may come out with a new firmware a little later adding that ability. Also, GIGABYTE told us that they saw up to a 30% increase in performance when going from a SATA2 to SATA 3 hard drive under HD Tach, measuring both burst and read speeds. Not bad.

Umm exactly how? All it is, is increasing how fast the bus can handle speeds. Its not technically speeding anything up and lieing about a 30% increase is a big whoa in my book. Unless they had possibly 3 of the fastest SSDs in Raid 0.....oh wait...they cant.

[OnBoard]

Originally Posted by OnBoard

Share the Gigabyte love too, but interesting read. Hopefully that will get fixed with next motherboard revisions.

This motherboard looks like a candidate when I'll next upgrade (not in a while). Still remember having an AsRock board that had one of the first (if not first) sataII slots and they came handy, when I upgraded to a sataII HDD. Now that there are motherboards with the future stuff, HDD and USB devices with support for it will start popping up and getting one without these will be silly (if price increase isn't big).

Heh, said 'not in a while' (upgrade) and ordered Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 yesterday Comes with same SATA 6 Gbps and USB 3.0 as it's bigger brother and most importantly LOTES socket

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ImageG...%20Motherboard

I remember when ASUS came out with first all solid capacitor P965 board and commented something about it here on the news too. Then went and bought the exact thing a while later

Infact, here's the thread (4th reply) http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=18854

Got the 'every motherboard with solid caps' part right, but don't know about the 'useless' part as the board is still going strong, just with a new owner

edit: oh and this is related, from newegg comments Gigabyte talking about how PCI-E lanes are used:
We would just like to clarify that it is possible to run SATA 3 and USB 3.0 while running CrossFireX and SLI on the GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD6. If two graphics cards are plugged in, the BIOS will automatically default to running SATA 3 and USB 3.0 from the PCI Express gen 1 port (off of the P55 chipset, not from the graphics PCI Express) at 2.5Gb/s. This is still more than adequate bandwidth for existing SATA 3 drives. So, it is possible to run dual graphics cards and SATA 3 and USB 3.0 at the same time. It is also important to keep in mind that P55 is a mainstream platform, with the majority of users in this category only using a single graphics card. And unlike our competitors who so far only offer SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 support for their most expensive P55 product offerings, GIGABYTE has support for ALL of our P55A motherboards, from top to bottom.