GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD4P LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard w/ USB 3.0 & SATA 6 Gb/s

Pros: Motherboard has no problems so far

Cons: I hoped to use the EasyTune Quick Boost functionality to do a moderate OC. I don't have time to do "real" overclocking (this is a work computer), and the online reviews seemed to indicate that this would be relatively painless. Well, the utility does not work at all on my machine. It installs but will not launch. I am not interested in troubleshooting it; I thought I purchased a turn-key, if unsophisticated OC solution.

Other Thoughts: I know that the real overclocker's will be thinking: Why are you not OCing in the BIOS? Answer: I don't have the knowledge or time. It's only easy if you know how to do it....

Pros: It is a decent quality motherboard.

Cons: The boot process is a little slow. It takes about 15 seconds to prepare to load the OS.

Other Thoughts: I haven't had too much time to learn the total ins and outs of this motherboard, so maybe after changing some Bios settings, the time to boot can be lowered.

Pros: Worked great for almost 3 months.

Cons: All of a sudden one day, Dead. Just hangs before ram test. Cannot enter bios and cannot use cdrom. MB lights up, fans turn on. I thought it was the video car so I bought a new one... nope. I thought it was a power supply connection so I tried new ones... nope. I thought it was the monitor so I tried it on two other computers... the monitor works. Comp is clean and looked over for any burn marks or broken parts... nothing. I've sent a ticket to gigabytes G.T.S. and it's being processed... for 3 days.

Other Thoughts: I thought it was a dirty computer after the new video card wouldn't work. So I went over with clean brushes, and a can of air. Still cannot get it to work. If this isn't resolved this week, I might have to consider buying a new MB and I have a feeling I won't go with Gigabyte even though it's my second board from them. The first still works but it's for a Pentium4, not I7.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for your comments. Honest and constructive opinions are always welcome. We apologize for your difficulty with your Gigabyte product. Please contact us at newegg-support@gigabyte-usa.com with the case number 2010121310 in the subject line. We will provide personalized service and analysis to help solve your issue as soon as possible.

If the matter is urgent, please send us your contact number, and we will contact you ASAP.

Gigabyte VIP Support Team

Pros: Running stable at 4.2 ghz all day long with back to back benchmarks in 3d Mark 11. There is so much I love about this board. THIS IS THE BOARD IS A MUST HAVE! The features that this board has are too numerous to mention. I use it as a server cause it has dual gb eithernet. On some days I use it to benchmark and on others I use the Dolby Digital 5.1 to listen to tunes at
Grooveshark.com and let me tell you -the sound is impecable when combined with a Yamaha Natural Sound reciever in 5.1 optical mode! Don't forget the Polk Audio's either! This board is future proof. Sure not much is going on with USB 3, or SATA 3, but I guarantee you -you'll be saying, "geez", that dude was right. Piece of mind comes when knowing that your system won't be outdated 3 or 6 months from now.

Cons: This board doesn't like the new Sata 3 SSD's (C300's) by Crucial.., which I have 2 in raid 0. Going back to Intel's Sata 2 chip on the board yielded better results. I don't know why this has been a problem for me? I think I'll buy a Sata 3 raid card in the future.

Other Thoughts: Gigabyte has done it's homework with manufacturing of this board. Hook up a pair of 5750's for cheaps and there isn't a game you can't play..., at least for now. I wax Phenom II X4's with 460's all day long!

Pros: *Performs well, for the most part
*Highly customizable BIOS
*Plenty of bells and whistles
*Plenty of failsafes to prevent you from frying your hardware

Cons: *There is a gigantic heatsink that obscures the first PCIe x1 slot. I don't know of any cards that'll fit in that first slot, though I could be wrong. That leaves two remaining PCIe x1 slots. Many video cards take up two slots, so the 2nd PCIe x1 slot is obscured by many modern video cards. That only leaves the bottom PCIe x1 slot as the only usable one for my partuclar configuration. If you need more than that and want to keep SLI as an option, you may be out of luck.
*The overclocking software isn't terribly intuitive.
*Poor English translation throughout the documentation.

Pros: This Board is made of high quality! Most the best board but it has a lot of the needed featurs!

Cons: only con is... in SLI you get the full spec from card 1 but in card 2, you only get half.... whats up with that? not even worth going SLI because you only get half performance from the 2nd card card.

Other Thoughts: works great! had this for about 2 months... i started to OC this and this is easy!! if you leave your "Performance Enhance" on standard- you will be stuck at 3.4ghz.... so change it from standard to turbo and then you can achive 4.0ghz!

Could add some more gadgets like 1 buttion over clock or LED volt display? but these are not cons, just suggestion..

Pros: - You can tell just by looking this is a high-quality board.

- Despite the tight space for the first card, the pci-e slots do leave a bit of airspace between cards, but you'll still need to plan for some custom cooling/more fans if you SLI.

Cons: - First video card slot doesn't have much wiggle room, you need to pick your card(s) carefully. (See other thoughts for recommended card.)

- Frontside usb case port near the back of the board

Other Thoughts: I bought 2 Gigabyte GTX 460 super overclock cards and they work great. (Fit into the 1st card's narrow space). I recommend these cards as they're quieter and cooler than regular gtx 470s but cheaper and have almost the same performance. (If you sli pick a good case with enough airflow)

Pros: -It has SATA III and USB 3.0 support
-It's blue
-It does what I need it to do... most of the time.

Cons: Right after having this mobo for a month one of the capacitors decided to die. I had to send it in to gigabyte (cost me an extra $12) and they decided to take their good old time processing it (about 3 weeks in total).

The placement of the RAM on the board can cause problems with certain fans that might block teeth or heat spreaders.

the front audio connector is located in the mobo's back... opposite the front. Not cool.

Other Thoughts: This was my first mobo purchase. I don't think that I'll be buying from gigabyte again since both of my gigabyte products (this mobo and the gtx 460 gfx card i got) broke.

Pros: sSLI and CrossFireX Support. easy recovery after failed posts. stupid easy to overclock. plenty of headers for most.
ie. usb,hdd,fans etc.

Cons: so far none.

Other Thoughts: about fifteen minutes from box to post. I set baseclock to 160
and installed windows. easy no prob.
Intel Core i7-870
Crucial Ballistix 4GB PC3 12800

Pros: It looks cool.

I should have just bought a cheap $100 board because all the bells and whistles on this board don't work.

My build:

i5-750
Win7 64 bit
AData Overclocking Ram 2200
60gb Boot SSD
4 x 1tb Hitachi hard drives in RAID 5
ATI XFX 5770
Samsung Blu-ray drive
Corsair H50
Corsair 850w psu
CoolerMaster CM690 II Advanced case

The board is very easy to set up mechanically. All of the plugs are in easy to access positions....pretty straight forward.

The board claims to do a lot...It really cannot. The auto overclocking doesn't work with my 5770 and it has a really annoying box that pops up every time it boots up saying so. Gigabyte cannot tell me why it does this nor do they have a fix.

Cons: The RAID is the biggest downfall of this board, which is the reason I bought it. The built in Raid capabilities dont work. It uses Intel Matrix Storage Console to control the larger RAID portion of the board (six sata ports). This is the one I use. There is a two port sata RAID controlled by Marvell, which I dont use.

I have 4 Hitachi 1tb hard drives set up in a RAID 5 controlled by Intel Matrix Storage Console. The RAID volume keeps failing. So the first thing I did was pull out the failed drive and have it tested. Its perfect and the firmware is up to date. It has done this several times with a different drive every time. So I called Hitachi and they pointed at Intel. I have called Intel and they say make sure the controller is up to date...which it is and then they pointed to Gigabyte. I called Gigabyte and they had me update the BIOS to F14...their newest. It didnt change a thing. Gigabyte told me to RMA the board if it fails the RAID again. It did...no surprise.

Other Thoughts: At this point I don't want to play the RMA game. I think I should just sell this board and get a different more reliable brand.

I bought the board to control a RAID and have a redundant computer to store all my stuff on. It sounds easier than it is apparently.

The fact is most of the bells on this board don't work. When you as a consumer try to figure out the problem all of the vendors just point their fingers at the other vendors. The only thing I can say is all of my hardware works mechanically and according to the product vendors......it just doesn't work together.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for your comments. Honest and constructive opinions are always welcome. We apologize for your difficulty with your Gigabyte product. Please contact us at newegg-support@gigabyte-usa.com with the case number 2010111001 in the subject line. We will provide personalized service and analysis to help solve your issue as soon as possible.

If the matter is urgent, please send us your contact number, and we will contact you ASAP.

Gigabyte VIP Support Team