GIGABYTE's GA-P55A-UD4P

GIGABYTE's P55A-UD4P is one of the first motherboards on the market that features onboard USB 3.0 and SATA 6G. Given its advanced features that are added on GIGABYTE's already feature rich board, you might think that the new "A" revisions might break the bank, but Newegg currently has stock available at 184.99.

When we first took at look at the storage capabilities of the P55A-UD4P, we wanted to see how it and the ASUS P7P55D-E Pro compared to one another. ASUS made a bit of a fuss over the way GIGABYTE implemented the Marvell SATA 6G and NEC USB 3.0 to motherboards. The whole pitch ended up backfiring on ASUS when it came to light that ASUS used an almost identical solution on one of their own motherboards. ASUS ended up with another egg sitting squarely on their face when we were able to actually get a closer look at the two companies P55 solutions with SATA 6G. GIGABYTE included RAID and ASUS just used two standard ports.

I have yet to see the new firmware listed on GIGABYTE's website, but it should show up any day now. The version we used for testing is labeled SP1208. Installing the firmware is quite easy. I made a bootable thumb drive and dropped the SP1208 folder as well as the 9128.bat file on the drive then booted to it. After you boot your machine to the drive just type in 9128 and press enter, the software takes over and once everything is completed it asks you to reboot the system.