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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mfs - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
how do you get 4 phase on the GA-P55M-UD2? looks like 6 by the photos? bit-tech says 6 too.andersbranderud - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Does anyone have any experiences with overclocking an i7-860 on this motherboard with 1333 mhz or 1600 mhz ram.In that case give me some more details.
Thanks!
Anders Branderud
bloganders.blogspot.com
zoggy - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
Was looking at picking up GA-P55M-UD2 for a HTPC, going to pair it with Core i7 860 and a ATI HD 5000 series card. Wanted to know if there was any problems with this board to do the bit-streaming of HD audio or if the UD4 would be better suited?Hrel - Friday, October 23, 2009 - link
Pictures of the Motherboard BIOS, THANK YOU SO MUCH!maomao0000 - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
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Googer - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
I don't see how the inclusion of something can be seen as a negative. I am sure there are a few users who still depend on a floppy drive from time to time (retro dos gamers, some drivers, and archiving old files) and it's presence has little to negative impact on the actual usability, functionality, or performance of the motherboard.As for my self, I have tried several times to remove my drive, only to have someone or myself find an unexpected need for it a few months later. So I still keep it installed but the drive it's self remains disabled in the bios until I actually need it. Having it enabled has no noticeable impact on my P4 based system.
Serveo - Friday, October 9, 2009 - link
Hi Gary,Nice review. I am planning to buy a p55 mATX board. There are some on the market but mostly they support only 16x & 4x GPU and thats a pity.
Only the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4 and ASUS Maximus III Gene support sli/cross at 8x mode. I would like to your review about these boards soon. The price for the GA-P55M-UD4 is available around € 130.- incl. VAT and the Maximus III Gene around € 170.- incl VAT.
Thats why I probably go for the Gigabyte due to the price an the board colors, but the board layout has some fails and according to the review at bit-tech.net the performance is not that good.
Gary when can I aspect the review about these boards? Or which of these two board would you advice?
Awnold - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - link
Hi Gary,Great article! Looking at other user's experience w/ the Gigabyte board, I've seen a number of complaints w/ memory compatibility (e.g., Newegg's reviews). Would you mind posting the part #'s of the different memories you tested this board with?
I did see your comment that the F4 BIOS improved memory compatibility, but to my knowledge they haven't updated their qualified memory list yet.
Also, if other users on this forum have experience w/ this board, would you mind posting your memory config as well?
Thanks!
Awnold - Friday, October 9, 2009 - link
I'm mostly curious about the G.Skill memory used. Does anyone have any success (or BSODs/failures) with the following modules:F3-12800CL7D-4GBRH
F3-15000CL9D-4GBRH
F3-16000CL9D-4GBRH
haplo602 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
stop with this P55 flood and finaly review a few 785G boards !!! please please PLEASE !!!I don't care about intel, I want to build an AMD PC and your site is severely lacking in that part ...