Budget Micro-ATX P55 Faceoff: Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 and ASRock P55M Pro
by Gary Key on October 5, 2009 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Next up is ASRock’s P55M Pro. You can purchase this board for around $100.
ASRock P55M Pro Feature Set
ASRock includes a full featured set of components like the Via VT1708S HD audio codec, Realtek RTL8111D Gigabit LAN controller, Via VT6330 IDE/IEEE 1394a combo chipset, powered eSATA/USB ports on the I/O panel, and full support for the Core i7/i5 S1156 processor series.
ASRock also includes a limited accessories bundle. You get the standard rear I/O panel cover along with 1 x IDE cable, 1 x Floppy cable, 2 x SATA cables, 1 x SATA power cables, an informative manual and quick installation guide, and software CD. We understand the need to cut costs where possible to meet a $100 price target, but including at least one USB 2.0/IEEE 1394a bracket for the headers would have been appreciated.
BIOS
ASRock has designed a BIOS that emphasizes quick auto overclock settings using their CPU or Memory presets rather manually overclocking the board. The breadth of granular BIOS settings in the Gigabyte UD2 board is just not available in the P55M Pro . The BIOS is setup for general overclocking duties and includes the typical P55 settings: CPU multiplier, PCI-E bus, Bclk frequency, memory multipliers, and important voltage options needed for overclocking.
ASRock includes Load Load-Line Calibration (LLC), or they refer to it as With or Without Vdrop. LLC will help to eliminate line droop on the VCore line, but also will cause VCore to overshoot set values when under load. We recommend having LLC disabled in most situations, but if you have to reach a certain overclock for benchmarking, then you should probably enable it. In our case, we enabled when overclocking above 3.8GHz since Vdrop was around -0.05V under load in most cases.
One strength of the BIOS is the auto OC settings that will quickly set the board up for overclocking your memory or CPU to a preset level. Both settings worked well with us favoring the CPU settings as the memory setting at 2133/2400 would drop the CPU multiplier to 13x~15x, resulting in CPU speeds lower than stock with Turbo disabled.
Our only problem with the CPU OC setup is that memory speeds would sometime drop below the capability of our kits with memory speeds running in the 1200MHz range. Those speeds actually do not penalize application performance by more than a couple of percent, but timings followed the SPD of the module. If the SPD is not setup properly, you could end up with CAS 9/10 settings at DDR3-1200. It is easy enough to change them but you end up defeating the purpose of a quick OC.
Voltages tended to range on the high side with the CPU auto OC settings. We understand the reasoning as the ranges needed to ensure stability across a wide variety of processor capabilities require running VCore/VTT a little higher than our CPU’s capabilities. This is the one drawback to preset settings utilized by Gigabyte and ASRock instead of auto overclocking routines based on actual component capabilities that ASUS utilizes. The good news is that on the CPU side, our system always reached the presets and was perfectly stable. Using the memory presets above DDR3-2000 resulted in a few lockups, especially with memory that had not been tested by ASRock.
ASRock has finally implemented BIOS flashing within the BIOS. Instant Flash can read files directly from a USB flash or hard drive making BIOS updating a simple and safe procedure. We tried this feature 30 times as part of our testing routine and it never failed.
We did have a couple of slight disappointments with the BIOS. In the voltage setting options, ASRock does not provide granular voltage settings in the same way that Gigabyte does on the UD2 board. The settings provided will allow for quick and easy overclocks to the 4.1GHz range. Practically speaking, that is probably a level we would not exceed in a 24/7 desktop to be honest.
However, it was a limiting factor in overclocking this board compared to the Gigabyte offering. The main culprit was the lack of VTT voltages between 1.36V and 1.42V. We feel that exceeding 1.40VTT could create a long term problem with Lynnfield CPUs. Intel’s guidance is still 1.35V as the recommended maximum, if not lower in most cases with these CPUs. We needed around 1.39V on VTT to ensure stable operation with our processors above 4.1GHz, we just would not run the 1.42V setting in the ASRock BIOS on air-cooling for performance improvements that would be minor on a daily basis.
BIOS Information
Let’s take a brief visual look at the BIOS.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
yacoub - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
785G is just onboard graphics halfbreed between 780 and 790 or whatever. until AMD releases a new line of high-end boards worth reviewing, why bother?haplo602 - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - link
P55 is just half a chipset, i5 took over some of the functionality anyway ... why bother ?tommy101 - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 - link
beastyhacks79.smfnew.com the best psp hacking sitebollux78 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
Why do we need PCI anymore? I´ll tel you why: The PCI bus is more than enough for a hell bunch of applications, that´s it. If you have a damn good sound card or video capture, or whatever the card you have, and it´s PCI, you´d love to have the slot in there, because you don need to ditch that card and bet a "fantastic" PCIE x1 new card.C´mon people, let´s use the computer for the right purpose, not just to give money to the manufacturers buying new parts that you don´t
necessarily need.
I know, I´m being inflexible and oldschool, but, please, evolution is one thing, marketing is a completely different animal.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
IMO it is more a board real estate problem than a case of buying the latest and greatest. On these P55 uATX boards you have 4 slots, one of which has to be devoted to graphics unless it is a headless server. If you use a dual slot graphics card (which a substantial portion of the readers on this site) you lose a second slot, and ideally you would have an open slot beneath that to ease airflow. So that leaves you with one or in a pinch two slots, therefore what interface they are is quite important. PCIe has been out on boards for what, 5-6 years now? I'd say its time to stop selling PCI cards and leave the PCI slots only on full ATX boards (plus maybe a few HTPC-oriented uATX boards) and let the interface finally die off.Though I'd say IDE has even less of a place now, SATA hard drives have been the norm for years and even optical drives for a few years. Time to upgrade if you are still carting one of those around.
sonicdeth - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Thanks Gary for the detailed review. Can't wait for the p55 roundup, and I'm also very interested now in your audo codec review.mindless1 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
... but I don't see the sense in SLI on mATX. Using the typical long video cards means you can't have a shorter depth case, just shorter height and since when is the area above your computer case a vital piece of real-estate?With 2, 8 or 16X slots onboard it only makes sense to me to go full ATX, is someone with the system budget to build a powerhouse gaming machine really poor enough, indescriminating enough, or young enough (to not have desirable cards from past systems) they don't want to add some other cards?
I hate to say it but this is getting to be a madness, the idea that we need to focus centrally on gaming ability of a board. Most people are not hard core gamers, but factually speaking, most hard core gamers don't do SLI either. Granted you can use a 16x slot for cards with fewer lanes, that seems the only saving grace for the two boards.
It's getting to the point I want a cTX case design where the drive racks are not in front of the mainboard and PSU, they are above them, so the case is even taller than std. ATX but not as deep.
Might tip over a little easier but earthquakes are rare here and plenty of other household items are more tip-happy than that would be.
strikeback03 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
There are cases made to hold a uATX board lying on the bottom, making it kinda a wider Shuttle. I'm personally looking for full ATX as well though, as the height doesn't matter too much to me (pretty sure anything short of a ABS Canyon or some of the bizarre decorative cases would fit under my desk) and don't want to limit my slot selection.Sunburn74 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Hey Anand,Gigabyte boards have on issue that drives me nuts. As soon as you start overclocking them, you lose the ability to S3 sleep. When you do your maximal overclocks for various board reviews, would you mind testing if S3 sleep was maintained at those maximal overclocks?
Gary Key - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
This board resumes from S3 (USB keyboard) at up to 215 Bclk (mentioned in the thoughts section, make that more visible next time) with our setup and that includes an external hard drive on the Firewire port which is properly instructed to shut down and restart.