Benchmark Results: Power And Overclocking

Intel should have made a universal socket so you could put a i3 or an i7 in the same board. Just want to throw that out there.

Cool! So far that's only 26 P55 motherboards tested. You're only about 1/3 of the way through testing every P55 board available at Newegg. Keep up the good work.

Theres a mistake about the MSI board, SLI certification is NOT given to this hardware . From what I've read, its a minimum of 8x 8x to qualify.
http://us.msi.com/index.php?func=p [...] =1890#menu
SLI certification also adds to the cost of the board.

Wow an MSI low end board that didn't die. If they can keep this up they will be ASUS's main competitor.

woot for gigabyte..too bad they didn't test the ud4 a while ago, with the budget boards >

I see that the max power requirement with overclocking was 256w.
Does this mean that the 750w psu used was a overkill?
Or more importantly- could this setup work with a 400w psu with sufficient
amp. on 12v rail?

Very nice, keep up de good work. But it would be nice to see some h55/h57 motherboards tested in the near future.

Good point icerock

+1

Another win from Gigabyte. Awesome!

I helped my computer illiterate cousin set up a relatively affordable computer but with decent components and brand new technolgy running a brand new Core i3 530 and the motherboard of choice was this Gigabyte model being reviewed here.

And although the board is only supposed to support the new new dual-core Core i3's and i5's from Bios version F6, I was able to boot it using the factory F3! So no hassles in trying to get the neighbours i5 750 to boot it up and upgrade the bios.

I know articles like this are normally written sometimes weeks in advance, but I wonder if Bios F6 or even F7c have any impact on lowering power consumption ?

Anyway, I find it a very good board for the money, very nice touches like eSata, lots of internal Sata ports, and all the Ultra Durable 3 quality features; it's got everything a person could want (except if you have lot of add-on cards and/or want to run Crossfire or SLi.)

But I'm left with a question: the first photo that shows all the motherboard bozes on top of each other has and Asus model, but you didn't review it. What happened ?

Good article. Looks like we are heading toward a more complete form of standardization. As usual, thanks for inlcuding mainstream benchmarks.

It's about time. Now I can start looking at a PC update... my mini p180 case awaits Windows 7! I feel like I need to get with the times

As others have said, what happened to the Asus board you have pictured?
Also, on page 6 you have the ASRock listed as having 2 PS/2 Mouse ports.

i just wait for NVIDIA NEW CHIPSET

i 'll just wait for new nvidia chip also new nvidia GPU card ...like it or not

Out of all these boards, I would pick the MSI GD-45. It has a lot of features from it's big brothers GD-65 and GD-80. I'm currently using the GD-65 and it's pretty stable. Although, if I were to build another P55 board, I would choose the ASUS Maximus GENE III. The onboard sound on that board is pretty good.