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
ASRock P55M Pro Layout
ASRock designed a very good layout for this board. The same negatives apply for this board as it did for the Gigabyte UD2, that is the continued inclusion of the floppy drive port, lack of passive cooling for the MOSFET area, and only two of the three fan headers offer temperature or speed controls. It is also difficult to install memory with a full size video card installed in the x16 PCIe slot.
The board does support CrossFireX operation although we highly recommend against this setup as the second PCIe x16 slot is actually an x4 electrical slot running off the P55 chipset with performance suffering up to 30% depending on the choice of video card and game.
ASRock utilizes a high quality four-phase plus one PWM setup on this board. The CPU area is open and will accommodate larger coolers like the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. Large push/pull coolers like the Vigor Monsoon III LT will block the first DIMM slot and potentially can interfere with the first PCIe x16 slot. A nice benefit that ASRock included is the ability to utilize a S775 cooler on this board. An old Q6600 cooler performed significantly better than the retail i5/750 in offline testing.
We are not crazy about the lack of passive heatsinks on the MOSFETs when overclocking, especially for the upper end limits for 24/7 stability. However, the MOSFETs only reached 59.6C under full load with our i7/860 operating at 4.1GHz. MOSFET load temps reached 49.8C with the i5/750 at 4.1GHz. We ran the board for about 200 hours with the 860 overclocked with the case fans turned off without a problem. This left just the Corsair 750HX providing air exhaust capabilities.
The IDE port, 24-pin ATX power connector, four DIMM slots, and four SATA 3G ports are located in the lower right hand corner of the board. This board supports dual channel memory configurations and 16GB of DDR3 memory when using 4GB DIMMS. Installing the memory with a video card inserted in the first slot is difficult but not impossible.
The placement of the
SATA ports is interesting compared to other board micro-ATX board designs. After
installing the board in several SFF cases, we have to say that we like it. But, we suggest the user installs the SATA
cables before installing the video card.
ASRock includes two PCIe x16 slots (x16 operation for the first slot, x4 operation for the second slot), one PCIe x1 slot, and a single PCI slot. The PCIe x1 slot will be unavailable when utilizing a dual slot video card. The front panel header, three USB headers, IEEE 1394a header, and floppy drive connector are located at the edge of the board.
The I/O panel is full. We have six USB 2.0 ports (total of twelve on the board), PS/2 mouse and keyboards ports, dual eSATA/USB powered ports from the P55, IEEE 1394a port offered by the Via VT6330 chipset, Gigabit Ethernet LAN port via the Realtek RTL8111D chipset, optical out/coaxial out S/PDIF ports, and the audio panel that provides 8-channel audio output from the Via VT1708S HD audio codec.
Tech
ASRock also features lower ESR solid capacitors, lower RDS(on) MOSFETs, and high quality chokes on their entry level board. This board is also EuP ready and features ASRock’s Instant Boot technology. We think the board is extremely well built for a $100 design considering the average cost of a P55 motherboard is around $153.
DPC Latency
Our test used the Core i5/750
at stock settings with 8GB of memory installed with timings set to 6-6-6-18 at
DDR3-1333. The latency numbers for the ASRock board are lower and more consistent than the Gigabyte board.
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goinginstyle - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
I loved the review also and it showed a lot of work went into testing these boards. I just wonder when TA152H is going to ruin this thread but until then it nice to see constructive posts. I also wish the mobo guys would just drop the floppy and IDE ports when possible. It would free up board real estate and hopefully drop the cost a little more.papapapapapapapababy - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
not touching any of this at least it has Socket 775 mounting holesusb3 @ pci3 @sata6 and im there.
Docket - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
It is a shame that there are no Linux versions of the Gigabyte software reviewed here... oh well maybe some day in a distant future.mitt - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Hallelujah! DPC latency benchmark in AnandTech reviews!mathew7 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
When MB manufacturers are going to let go of PCI?I recently switched to Micro-ATX, and found I have a real problem of choosing a motherboard.
I'm looking at buying a PCIe X-Fi, but would like to use a dual-slotted video card. But I would like to keep my options open for a second card (I'm htinking about physics, not SLI/CF, so dual-slot cooling is not required). While the Gigabyte does not pass my requirements, the Asrock also has a problem: usage of a dual-slot-cooled card inhibits the usage of the PCIex1 slot.
I intend to switch to i5/P55 at the start of next year, so I'm watching closely.
Jaybus - Thursday, October 8, 2009 - link
That will be a slow transition. There are still a lot of PCI adapters being sold out there, especially for some specialty markets like scientific instrumentation that take time to transition to new interfaces due to cost and low volume. Nevertheless, the demise of PCI is starting to happen. For most people it's not a big deal, because they only need 1 or 2 PCIe x16 slots for graphics cards and will never use the rest of the slots anyway.MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Kind of funny but Intel is leading the pack in that specific area, their $200 (ugh) 'Extreme' DP55SB mATX P55 mobo has no PCI slots, also no PS/2, IDE or floppy. Maybe it's consistent since they ditched PS/2 and other legacy connectors on some boards a while back. No telling on the overclocking front but it is an 'extreme' board so it may have at elast some overclocking features. It has a couple of neat features actually, Bluetooth and Intel NIC.Jaybus - Thursday, October 8, 2009 - link
And uATX is a good platform to remove PCI from. Why not drop it from uATX? They can always leave it on ATX boards for a while for those who absolutely need PCI slots. I think other manufacturers will follow that path very soon.MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
*bzzt* The only PCIe 2.0 lanes on a P55 platform are from the CPU. So look carefully at specs and double check with companies when they say their secondary slots, especially ones that aren't even 16x mechanical, are PCIe 2.0. The UD2's 4x electrical slot in particular is clearly not according to Gigabyte, the ASRock claims to be but I'm not sure how if all 16 CPU PCIe 2.0 lanes are used for the graphics slot. If they used a lane splitter to provide PCIe 2.0 lanes to the other slots it kind of defeats the purpose, and if so it would be good to check performance with those slots populated.MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
To follow up on this, the comment was based on the first few paragraphs. I looked over Intel's manual for their 'extreme' mATX board for my post about it and Intel actually states their mobo has PCIe 2.0 lanes to the additional PCIe slots. Not surprising for the 8x slot I guess but it is for the 1x slots and it seems unlikely Intel would misquote specs.On a related note there is one thing I've not seen yet from any review and that is how PCIe lanes get assigned, mainly to the primary 16x slot, when populating a secondary PCIe slot with a 1x or 4x card. Do the lane splitter chips assign 8x lanes to a secondary slot which has a 1x or 4x card or what? Not a huge deal but it's a little thing that would be nice to know.