Budget Micro-ATX P55 Faceoff: Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 and ASRock P55M Pro

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.