Gigabyte Invitational Editor's Day 2009 - Lynnfield / P55
New Products
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P55-UD6 |
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P55M-UD4 |
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P55 Motherboard Models: |
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In all, Gigabyte plans to put eleven P55 motherboards on the market. You read that right, eleven different models including two micro-ATX sized boards to make up for the fact that they decided not to make a small form factor X58 product. The most exciting model for enthusiasts will probably be the P55-UD6 which has three PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, 24 phase power, DDR3-2200 compatibility, and six DIMM slots. It is still a dual channel configuration, but the capability to allow for six memory sockets has been added.
Colin Brix, Gigabyte's Technical Marketing Manager, spoke extensively about the new features found on their new P55 motherboards. For example, the 24 phase power VRM design should provide increased overclocking ability and lower operating temperatures under load. In addition, he introduced the Smart 6 PC system management utilities that should make performance tweaking easier for less savvy users and enthusiasts alike. Smart 6 consists of Dual BIOS, QuickBoot, QuickBoost, Recovery, Recorder, and TimeLock. We also saw how Gigabyte's Smart TPM data protection worked via USB drive or Bluetooth enabled cellphone. It will definitely be interesting to see the benefits of all the features found these boards play out once the platform is officially launched.
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With the launch of Intel's new platform, expect to see memory speeds increase while latencies tighten. Kingston's Mark Tunkenoff was there to show us their dual channel DDR3-2133MHz HyperX kit which will be widely available at launch. The enthusiast memory features XMP and should be nice and fast right out of the box, but will also pack some overclocking headroom for those who are willing to push the limits of their systems.
Speaking of pushing limits, Charles Wirth of Xtremesystems.org spoke briefly about the P55 platform from the overclocking perspective and showed us some impressive achievements. Unfortunately, we can't share the specific numbers just yet, but enthusiasts should be very excited about the P55 as it could potentially offer even higher overclocks (CPU frequency, bclk, memory speed) than any other Intel platform currently available.
