8-Phase Power
On the other side of those 10 chokes (and under the heatsinks) are the low RDS(on) MOSFET transistors. Gigabyte is calling this a true eight-phase design able to switch down to as few as two phases during light loads.
Now This Is What We're Used To
Dual-channel architecture, four memory slots--yeah, that's a little more like what we'd expect to see (not that the six-slot -UD6 isn't an interesting idea). Despite its two-slot disadvantage, the EP55-UD4P still supports up to 16 GB of DDR3 memory.
Now What Could Go There?
Some of the boards we saw at Computex had ONFi slots soldered onto them. Clearly, this sample doesn't, but it's interesting PCBs are now being defined with the NAND flash interface in mind, even if the P55 chipset won't employ it.
The latest spec revision of the Open NAND Flash interface facilitates performance as high as 200 MB/s, so it could prove to be a significant performance-enhancing feature once it's implemented (unlike Intel's Turbo Memory technology, which did little for notebook performance).
Coming Soon To A Mid-Range System Near You
No word on anticipated pricing for either of these two Gigabyte P55-based motherboards, but we're naturally expecting them to pop up as Core i5 launches, so we'll know soon enough.
