Introduction

Lynnfield is now starting to really make its mark on the motherboard world. Intel now holds all the cards when it comes to performance computing. Taking the crown back from AMD's Athlon 64 and moving it to the newest processor line, the Core i5 and the Core i7 8xx series designed for the new LGA 1156 platform have proven to be extremely successful.

We have been lucky enough to get early previews, but until we got our hands on any Lynnfield processors it's been a nightmare because they look so good. But getting to test them, that's the big question. We have already put one LGA 1156 board through its paces here, the P7P55D Deluxe from ASUS, but now it's time to start ramping out at full speed.

Today's candidate is a high-end board for the mainstream market from the good people at GIGABYTE. The P55-UD6 is one of the latest boards to run on the P55 single chip solution from Intel. Aimed for a more high-end market in the mainstream, this board comes in at just under $250USD over at Newegg which isn't a great deal more than the ASUS offering. Will it match up in performance and features? We shall endeavour to answer this question.