The Layout - Continued

Now that we have covered the exciting upper half of the P55-UD6, we can move on to the lower half of the board. As with the rest of the P55-UD6, it follows a traditional ATX layout. We see the typical number of PCI-E slots and of course the throw back PCI slots. As we mentioned earlier, the top PCI-E x1 slot is pretty much useless, as is the one located directly below the primary PCI-E x16 slot.

I have no idea what the designers were thinking here. It makes no sense at all to include these slots if they are not going to be usable by the majority of people. This board is obviously aimed at enthusiasts, so you can expect a dual-slot cooler GPU in this position.

When we had our "date" with the P55-UD6 GIGABYTE was still planning for a total of 10 (yes, 10) SATA ports. There would be six SATA-II and four SATA-6G ports.

Unfortunately we have just recently learned that there are some issues with the Marvell controller used (shown below). This has caused a last minute redesign of the board.

We do not have any word on what will take the Marvell SATA-6G controllers place, but it could be another SATA controller to maintain the tracing layout that is already in place.

GIGABYTE has also included a set of diagnostic LEDs to help you with any POST-time trouble shooting. Some of you will also be happy to know that there is still a legacy PATA-IDE port as well as a floppy port.

For the I/O side of the board we see that GIGABYTE is maintaining its usual plethora (yes, I know what a plethora is) of connectivity options.

There are eight USB 2.0 slots and what also appears to be two powered e-SATA ports. Further to that is Toslink and Coaxial digital audio out, a dual purpose keyboard/mouse PS/2 port, FireWire 400 and 800, Dual Gigabit LAN and the usual six-port analogue audio outputs.

Below we've included a few more images of the P55-UD6 for your viewing pleasure.