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GA-P55-UD3L questions

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puterfx

New Member
Joined
Feb 13, 2010
[Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3L] questions

Does anyone know anything about this board?

I've been looking at and comparing GB's P55A and H57 boards for a couple of weeks now ... something to put my i5-750 on that has RAID. I'n not heavy into gaming yet so Crossfire and SLI weren't a concern. The USB 3.0 and SATA 6 were intriguing but I had a hard justifying the extra money so I got this board for the time being. I also have been following the Foxconn issue and finally got a response back from GB that all the P55A boards are using Lotes but I'm not going to OC the system, at least not that much, so that isn't a big concern either until my next board. I have 4-500Gb HDD's that I'm setting up in 2 RAID1 scenarios and a 160 Gb that I want to dual boot (Win XP Pro 32 bit and Win7-64 bit) plus my SATA DVDRW so I'm good with the 6 Sata port. SATAe would have been nice but I can live without it. From reading these forums, and others, I realize the importance of installing the latest drivers, which I have downloaded. Thank you.

So now that you have an idea of my setup ...

Are there any known issues with this board? There aren't many reviews out there for it.

Also, would it be better to set the RAID up as ACHI or RAID in the bios? On my Intel board, I have it set to RAID and haven't had any issues. What is the advantage to ACHI?

Best mid range cpu cooler for the i5-750? Also, I have a NZXT M59 case with cooling vents in front, side back and top so I should be able to ventilate rather well.

Right now, I have an 8500GTX graphics card. What would be good mid priced card that would handle most games and business graphics like with Photoshop?

Thanks for your input.
 
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The UD3L lacks MOSFET cooling. It will be fine for non-OC work. I have the the equivalent mATX board - the P55M-UD2 - on one of my machines. It's a solid performer. No issues. Here is the review that convinced me to buy it. Down in the comments the author said he had OC'c the board pretty far with no issues, even under load. And I have taken the board up above BCLK = 200 and cpu = 4GHz, but I didn't try any stress testing there.

I think you got a great board. But if you decide to OC, get a MB with cooled MOSFETS.
 
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Or you can get some arctic silver glue (if it is still available) and glue heatsinks on the mosfets yourself...I did back in the late 90's you just have to be carefull that you don;t get the clue on any traces or connections, because the arctic silver is conductive.
There used to be "ramsinks" on the market for adding cooling to the ram chips on your vid card, and some radicals put em on their main memory as well, but the point I'm getting to is that the ramsinks are good at cooling the mosfets and it really does help the stability of the mainboard. I think Swiftech is still in business...maybe they still sell theirs :) If you get lucky,you might find some with an adhesive strip attached.
 
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