As you all should know by now, I have been on a mission to exploit the performance potential of Gigabyte’s P55 motherboards. I started by using the P55-UD3R to break four world records using Intel’s i5 750 quad core CPU. Please feel free to visit my full overclocking review of the P55-UD3R here. I found it to be very impressive for a sub-$150 mainstream motherboard. As you can imagine, when Gigabyte told me they were already working on an update to that formula with the new P55A-UD3R, I was very interested to see the result!
Two weeks ago, Gigabyte Japan delivered on that promise and sent me the new P55A-UD3R, and an added bonus, the P55A-UD6. At first glance I could tell the changes were more than updated marketing. The boards have a few new features that are very interesting indeed. The biggest of which would have to be the inclusion of a SATA 6 GB/s controller, and a USB 3.0 or “SuperSpeed USB” (also known as “SSUSB”) controller. Also readily apparent on the UD3R was an upgrade in the power delivery from 8 phases for the original, to 12 phases on the new version! I was very eager to see if the added phases of power circuitry would boost the overclocking potential, and I wasted no time finding out! Right off the bat, and with only 4 liters of liquid nitrogen to play with, I was quickly able to push my i5 750 CPU to new heights and break the elusive 100% OC barrier. That means I was able to double the default speed of 2660MHz…check it out!
