Gigabyte P55M-UD2 review

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Verdict:

At almost £100, we can't see how the price of this motherboard is justified by its modest specification.

Review Date: 25 Apr 2011

Price when reviewed: £92

Buy it now for: £78
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.porthale.co.uk

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Gigabyte’s P55M-UD2 is a slightly cluttered looking microATX board for Intel’s socket LGA1156 Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. Gigabyte has crammed in two PCI slots and two PCI-E x16 slots. One of the PCI slots will be blocked if you install a graphics card with a large cooler and the second slot runs at x4 rather than x16 if two cards are installed. Four memory slots can take up to 16GB of RAM running at speeds of up to 2,200MHz.

The board doesn’t support the SATA3 standard, but has seven internal SATA2 ports and one eSATA port on the back panel. The back panel also has ten USB ports, which are very welcome if you have a lot of external peripherals. Internal USB headers allow you connect up to four more ports via your case’s front panel. There’s also a Firewire port, a PS/2 connector, six 3.5mm analogue audio ports and both digital and coaxial S/PDIF outputs. There’s no integrated graphics support, so you’ll have to use a dedicated graphics card.

The P55M-UD2 looks like a no-frills board - the large number of USB ports are its only really remarkable feature. At around £90, it’s definitely not priced accordingly - you can buy Asrock’s superior P55 Extreme 4 for the same money. It's it easy to overclock, but you can’t save your own profiles. Its performance with our reference processor produced a relatively low score of 125 Overall, but there’s not a lot in it - Asrock’s board got 129.

Although it does the job, the P55M-UD2 doesn’t justify its price, even with Gigabyte’s three-year warranty. If you just want a simple LGA1156 board that does the basics, you’re better off with the Asus P7H55, which is significantly cheaper.

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