FRONTPAGE Gigabyte P67A-UD7 Sandy Bridge Motherboard Review

[Overclockers.com]

With the recent launch on Intel's second generation CPU architecture named "Sandy Bridge", we have seen quite a few P67 motherboards hit the market. Gigabyte has not disappointed us with their flagship motherboard, the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 which will be the focus of this review. The board follows...

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[Theocnoob]

What an excellent and thorough review. I'd read a lot about this board and learned new things, such as the presence of the new VRD chip.

 

[Brolloks]

For those that have this board I'd like to share a key piece on the bios information which caused me much frustration initially, I did touch on it in my review....the board comes with a default bios which is not easily flashed, it is meant to act as backup that when you corrupt the 2ndary bios the default one is loaded. The problem is that whenever your OC fails the board would load the old F3 from the backup into the 2ndary so you would need to flash it again. The fix is you have to flash the primary bios with a later F7d or later, after that you can pretty much put any bios in the secondary and it will stay there.

To flash a new bios into the backup from the secondary bios press Alt F11 when you boot up, this will then copy the bios in the secondary into the primary (default).
Note that flashing has to be done with caution, if you don't do it correctly you can mess up the default and potentially render the board useless.

 

[SPARC]

Thanks for the tip Brolloks. I've been reading where a lot of guys over at OCN fixed their rebooting loop by doing this. They claim you need both BIOS versions to match and its a good idea to do this after each BIOS update. I have a UD4 coming this week and I'm jotting all of this stuff down in case my system is as buggy and some claim their systems are.

 

[wagex]

now i wanna trade in my ud4 and get the 7! lol because of the rebooting issue does the ud7 have it too? i have flashed both sets of bios to match still have the reboot issue

 

[hackerballs]

i have this board and I found out that if I freeze with OC and use reset, then my BIOS resets also..................but if I Power Down with the Power button and reset, it continues on without losing my settings...............strange but works good...........also you should set your Profile in BIOS so that you can recover easily......GA recommends this

All in all...............Best MB yet..............

 

[Brolloks]

now i wanna trade in my ud4 and get the 7! lol because of the rebooting issue does the ud7 have it too? i have flashed both sets of bios to match still have the reboot issue

If you have the right bios you will not have rebooting issues at all

 

[hackerballs]

i have the most recent BIOS for the B3 as there are only 2, lol................

 

[PolRoger]

Nice review Edmund.

 

[ShutIT]

Just purchased

Thanks for the review, it will be very useful as I just put this together last night.
I did a lot of research and love that this boards supports 2 lanes at 16x. One small complaint about this board is that the first pci x1 is useless because of the heat sink just below the CPU. Not even a small factor card, my big foot network card, will fit in the space, not a big deal but eventually when I set up my SLI I will have to pull it from the other lane. If I switch it to third lane, it will drop down the speeds to x8 in all three. Board has network teaming (LACP) with dual lans but I have'nt seen same ping levels on same servers I usually game on with the big foot card in. Anyway, look forward to tweaking out this board. Thanks for all the great information.