Intel’s attempt to make Core i7/i5 accessible at a budget price.
To follow on the heels of MIAHALLEN’s great article reviewing the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R last week, I decided to focus my search on finding the best Intel P55 motherboard deal. The P55-UD3R is a midrange motherboard aimed at overclockers with heatsinks on the chipset and the voltage regulator. You can see from MIAHALLEN’s review that this motherboard performs very well and the best deal I could find was $134.99 at Buy.com
So is there a better P55 deal out there for overclockers? The best less expensive competing motherboard I could find was the Biostar T5 XE which drops to 6-phase power. There are two versions of this board floating around: the XE officially only supports CrossFireX and the XE CFX-SLI adds SLI support. At Newegg.com these two version are the same price, but when I searched around I was able to find the CFX-SLI version for $104 at Frys.com after a mail-in rebate (MIR) or $119 without the MIR, which is still a good deal. I couldn’t find many reviews on this board to compare the overclocking performance to the Gigabyte board, but Biostar historically competes very well at a budget price and I wouldn’t expect anything less from this motherboard. It’s also very scarce on HWBot.org.
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