Gigabyte P67A-UD4 LGA 1155 ATX Motherboard Review

Power Consumption and Conclusions

Editor’s Note: There are obviously some concerns about reviews on the 2nd Gen Intel Core processor platform, in particular motherboards based on the Cougar Point chipset, aka P67/H67.  On January 31st, Intel announced that it had found a bug in its chipset that could cause issues with SATA channels disconnecting and has issued a recall on all or most parts.  As a result, the majority of the Sandy Bridge based processors and P67/H67 motherboards have been pulled from online and retail sales.  

You might wonder then why we are posting a review of such a product.  In short, though we are disappointed that the products are not currently on the market for sale, the fact is that we have never seen these failure issues and the performance and features of the products still properly represents the capabilities it will offer when they return to the channel in March or April.  We have several platform reviews finished or in the pipeline and we plan on publishing all of them for informational purposes to our readers – that is always our goal anyway.  

But, expect to see this note of warning on every one of them.

During power consumption testing, the P67A-UD4 followed right behind the P8P67 Pro in keeping power usage down during idle testing as well as ensuring just enough power was being distributed during load testing. These new cores combined with Gigabyte’s 12-phase power design will help users save a few bucks on their energy bills.

Performance

The P67A-UD4 kept pace with its ASUS and ECS competitors throughout most of our performance testing. This board seemed to show its true strength during PCMark Vantage testing that showcases the board’s ability to do various PC operations that normal users use their computers for. We were a bit disappointed with the rest of our gaming and media encoding results, but overall the P67A-UD4 stayed in the middle of the pack throughout our entire suite of benchmarks.                       

Features 

Most enthusiast-level, P67 boards give users a ton of support for modern and legacy hardware and the P67A-UD4 is no exception. The dual PCIe slots running at x16 with one graphics card and 8×8 with dual graphics card running in either SLI or CrossfireX configurations should help users who like to upgrade to the latest and greatest GPUs as NVIDIA and AMD continue to leap frog each other almost every quarter. The rest of the features on this board are pretty standard because of the P67 chipset, but Gigabyte also added extra support for SATA 6GB/s and USB 3.0 devices.

Pricing and Availability

As of Feb. 2, the Gigabyte P67A-UD4 is only available at a few select vendors because of the issues surrounding the P67 chipset. While Newegg pulled this board from their website, we were still able to find it on Amazon.com for $199 and MWave.com for $185.                   

Final Thoughts

We’d like to thank our friends at Gigabyte for providing the P67A-UD4 for our review today. The expectations for this motherboard was very high, and the P67A-UD4 had some highs and lows we discussed throughout the entire article. 

Some of the high points included the redesigned PCB with the new low-profile heatsinks and black color scheme. But, the low points involved sub-par gaming benchmark scores and fair overclocking results. We were also a bit disappointed with the lack of a full EFI BIOS with mouse support. 

Overall, after Intel’s debacle with the P67 chipset is straightened out, I think Intel’s new CPUs and chipset have plenty of room to mature and I hope Intel and Gigabyte can give overclockers a little more to work with other than increasing the CPU multiplier and Vcore on unlocked K-series processors.

Strengths

• Good price point
• Decent overclocker
• Two PCIe slots with SLI/CrossfireX support
• Gorgeous PCB design                                                                             

Weaknesses

• Hybrid EFI BIOS doesn’t include mouse support or full GUI functionality
• Sub-par gaming benchmark scores