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
There's really no other way to say this: ASRock's P55M-Pro, Gigabyte's GA-PA55M-UD2 and Foxconn's P55MX all perform almost exactly the same in every single benchmark we ran.
Application tests, game tests, LAN tests, even USB, Firewire, and SATA controller performance was virtually identical across the board. We've known for a while now that motherboards of a given generation all perform the same, but there's honestly no more to it than that.
We've included a wealth of application, gaming and peripheral performance data for you to see for yourself, but honestly, it's not what's important when it comes to picking a micro-ATX P55 motherboard. Features, overclocking potential, support, and price point are what matter here.
The biggest difference between the boards, from a performance standpoint, actually surfaces in power consumption:
At
idle the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 draws the least amount of power while under load, ASRock's P55M-Pro is absolutely stingy. It's not a huge margin, but big
enough to crown the Gigabyte board the least power hungry micro-ATX P55 board we've tested from an overall vantage point. We had to make sure that Enhanced Halt State (C1E) was enabled on the ASRock board along with ACPI Suspend (S3) was set to auto for all power management features to work correctly. If you happen to be using an SSD drive, then the Check Ready Bit option must be disabled on the ASRock BIOS (AMI in general) or the system might not resume correctly from S3. Otherwise, S3 resume worked properly on both boards at stock and overclocked settings.
Application/Gaming Performance
We're presenting all of the application/gaming performance data without commentary because, as we mentioned before - there's no real appreciable performance difference between these three boards. All of the boards were run with the Core i5 750 and we've included the Phenom II X4 965 BE as well as the i7 860, 870 and 920 purely for reference. Please check our Lynnfield launch article to see how well this processor performs against a variety of CPUs.
In many of our tests, the Core i5 750 is the same speed or faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE. The lack of Hyper Threading prevents it from being a runaway success. In other cases, the Phenom II X4 965 is faster - and by a large degree.
Intel was very careful to disable HT on the 750, without it, there would be no reason to spend the extra money on the Core i7 860. Just as it was with Bloomfield, $284 is the sweet spot for Lynnfield if absolute performance is a requirement. Now for the benchmarks.
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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.