Gigabyte P67A-UD3R-B3 Intel P67 motherboard Review – Intro
Bluetooth 23 May 2011
Although Z68 boards are readily available in the market, the price of Z68 boards might turn away DIY users. If you are just a gamer that plugs in discrete desktop VGA card, the Intel P67 board at a good price point might just be the choice over the more expensive Z68 which offers just a little bit more with Lucid to tap the transcoding power of the processor.
Today, we take a look at the Gigabyte P67A-UD3R-B3. As you are probably aware, the Intel P67 released early this year was recalled due to bugs. This B3 revision solves the issues and Gigabyte came out with a B3 model with a new packaging.
The P67A-UD3R-B3 is based on the Intel P67 B3 revision chipset. It support for Intel® Core™ i7 processors/Intel® Core™ i5 processors/ Intel® Core™ i3 processors/Intel® Pentium® processors/Intel® Celeron® processors in the LGA1155 package. It has 4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 32 GB of system memory in Dual channel memory architecture. It supports DDR3 2133/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz memory modules, non ECC and XMP profiles.
For multimedia, it comes with on board Realtek ALC889 codec 7.1 ch audio with Dolby Home Theater and S/PDIF out. For gamers, it has a Realtek RTL8111E chip (10/100/1000 Mbit) for high speed LAN.
The board has two full length PCIe slots running at PCIe 2.0x 16 and PCIe 2.0 x 4.It supports CrossFireX. The PCIEX16 slot operates at up to x4 mode when ATI CrossFireX™ is enabled. There are 3 PCIe 2.0 x1 and 2 PCI slots.
On board there are 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3_0, SATA3_1) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices
and 4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2_2, SATA2_3, SATA2_4, SATA2_5) supporting up to 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices
They support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10.
As for USB, the board supports up to 14 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (8 on the back panel, 6 via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers). The USB 3.0 is supported by Renesas D720200 chip with up to 2 USB 3.0/2.0 ports.
The board is designed with a longer lifetime in mind. It comes with a Dual CPU Power Engine allownig the CPU VRM power phases to split evenly into 2 sets of power engines that operate in tandem. As such GIGABYTE Dual CPU Power effectively halves the amount of work done by each set of power phases to significantly increase motherboard durability and reliability. It also has a VRD 12 Compliant CPU Power Design
On top of all these, it supports Dual BIOS 3TB+ HDD, Ultra Durable3, On/Off Charge technolgy, Super Speed USB 3.0, Turbo USB 3.0, SATA 6Gbps, 3X USB power boost, Turbo XHD(full automatic RAID 0), DES 2, Smart 6, CloudOC, Hotkey OC, AutoGreen, Hardware OverVoltage ControlIC, Dolby Home Theatre and is ErP compliant.