Gigabyte P67A-UD7 – Features

Gigabyte has been quick to leap on the LGA1155 platform, having already launched one-half a dozen P67-based motherboards. The company's most extreme offer, and mayhap the near aggressive looking board in our roundup, is the P67A-UD7.

Gigabyte has dropped their bluish PCB and baby blue/white components in favor of a matte blackness pattern, at least for the majority of their P67 boards anyway. The P67A-UD7 is rather evil looking and possibly the coolest looking board we take ever seen.

Aesthetics aside, the P67A-UD7 touts plenty of nifty features including dual Gigabit LAN, 8-channel audio, SATA 6Gb/s RAID, eSATA, USB 3.0 and a number of other innovative technologies.

The Gigabyte DualBIOS technology has been around for years and features 2 concrete BIOS ROMs allowing users to apace recover from BIOS harm, be that viruses or improper BIOS updating. In add-on, DualBIOS now supports booting from 3TB+ (terabytes) hard drives without the demand for division, and enables more data storage on a unmarried hard drive.

Gigabyte'southward On/Off Charge applied science lets y'all accuse a USB device regardless of whether your PC is on, in standby or even off. It besides allows those devices to draw more electric current than standard USB ports allow, speeding upward the recharging process past as much every bit 40%.

Gigabyte has also included a feature that called Turbo USB 3.0, which is said to boost functioning past up to x%. When enabled, the characteristic provides the fastest possible performance by allocating PCIe lanes to connect the CPU and USB 3.0 controller chip. This provides approximately 10% better performance than when it is disabled and USB 3.0 traffic is directed through the chipset.

It is worth noting that Turbo USB iii.0 utilizes 8 PCIe VGA lanes, so information technology is only possible to enable information technology with a unmarried graphics card running at PCIe x8 on P67 chipset motherboards.

The P67A-UD7 gets USB 3.0 from a pair of Renesas D720200 chips which are supported by a pair of VLI VL810 hubs. Each of the Renesas D720200 chips is connected to a PCI Express two.0 x1 (5.0Gb/s) lane and provide 2 USB 3.0 ports. The 2 VLI VL810 hubs, which are really fabricated by VIA, replicate the Renesas ports.

The VLI VL810 from VIA is the industry's offset fully integrated single chip solution that supports USB 3.0'south transfer rates, assuasive maximum data transfer rates of up to 5Gbps, or ten times the throughput bachelor to USB 2.0 devices. The P67A-UD7 features ten USB three.0-capable ports (six on the back panel, four via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers).

Also included is a Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 controller which provides FireWire (IEEE1394a) support for 3 ports. Two of the FireWire ports are on the back console while the third comes from connecting the supplied bracket to the internal IEEE1394a header.

Gigabyte has likewise expanded the P67A-UD7's storage options by including ii of the popular Marvell 88SE9128 controllers seen on the ECS board. Each controller supports a pair of SATA 6Gb/due south ports forth with NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and hardware RAID 0, ane, 5 and 10.

Two of these ports are situated onboard while the other two are located on the I/O panel where they provide eSATA connectivity. Both ports are cocky-powered meaning users can practice away with power cords for their eSATA devices.

Gigabyte opted for the conventional Realtek ALC889 codec, which supports Dolby Dwelling Theater and S/PDIF out while also providing ii/4/v.1/7.1 aqueduct audio. Overall, the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 looks to be ane of the best-equipped P67 motherboards available, though information technology'due south as well one of the most expensive.