GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD3-B3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 Motherboard

3

3degree

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 23, 2007
Messages
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This looks to be one of the few P67 mobo's available at the Egg...... Is there a reason for this?

I don't need SLI but would like to play around OC'ing an i5 2500K.

Any other recommendations (esp., that don't involve waiting for months)???? I'm looking to upgrade my box and dump my old q6600 and abit ip35pro down to the kid's machine that is in desperate need of an upgrade (athlon 2500 w/ a7n8x)......
 
Too funny - I'm in the exact same boat as you! I currently have a Q6600 on an IP35 Pro board w/8800GTS vid card, and I'm upgrading to a SB setup with a 2500K and P67 mobo. I found this thread because I actually purchased the Gigabyte board from NewEgg yesterday (I should have it tomorrow), and I wanted to see if I could find any reviews on it in case I ran into any problems with OC'ing the board.

So far all I can find are people who had issues with the B2 version, I haven't found any feedback on the B3 version yet. And that's odd because all of the other B3 boards on NewEgg have feedback on them, whereas this one doesn't even show a picture yet. Strange.

I debated between this Gigabyte board and the MSI P67A-GD65, but went with the Gigabyte because the MSI board wasn't in stock at the moment and I'm extremely impatient. I figure if I set this one up and it doesn't work I'll just order the MSI now that it's in stock and once I get it I'll just send the GB board back.
 
I was considering the MSI for a second system, but the fact that you can *blow up* the board, and take out the CPU and PSU with it, just by using power saving options in the software, made that a no-go. (apparently those options were removed in an update on their page). Someone clearly had a brain fart when writing that software...
 
and the lack of feedback on NewEgg and the lack of threads on here on this board had me worried that there was some issue with this board and was being avoided for some reason, and I thought I should ask before pulling the trigger too.
 
I'm guessing it's just a lack of buying, rather than it having issues. If a ton of people bought it and had issues with it, then I would think there would be negative feedbacks on NewEgg as well as threads about problems on the forums. Since I can't really find much feedback either way, I'm guessing it's just that people haven't started buying this yet - probably because everyone is in the same boat as us where they can't find any reviews on it. I bet once it gets a handful of positive reviews on NewEgg it'll start flying off the shelf.

I'm getting mine today, so I'll set it up tonight and try to post some feedback on it after doing some testing.
 
I'm holding out for the UD5 - have had good experience with Gigabyte. In Stock doesn't necessarily mean problematic. Could be that there are a significant number in stock, or its feature set isn't the most desirable (for me it's the lack of SLI).
 
Well I got my board yesterday and swapped out my old IP35 Pro/Q6600 setup for the new P67A-UD3/2500K setup, and everything went smoothly.

The board booted up on the first try with no problems at all. And on the very first boot I went into the BIOS and cranked the multiplier up to 42x (4.2Ghz), set my RAM voltage at a fixed 1.5V and the RAM speed at 1600 with 8-8-8-24 timings (I have 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws X Series, CL8). Saved the settings and restarted, and once again booted back up with no problem and Windows loaded right up.

This is my first motherboard swap since switching to Windows 7, and I was pleasantly surprised that Windows automatically installed all the necessary drivers. There were a few less important ones that Windows didn't automatically install (can't recall which ones off-hand), but I just DL'd those from the Gigabyte website and installed them. I didn't have much time to run any tests or anything, but I can tell you without a doubt that my system was running MUCH quicker than my old setup.

I did notice a few things with the layout of this board that I didn't like. First and probably most important, the two SATA III ports are located right behind the second PCI-e slot, and they are positioned vertically so the cables come straight up from the board. The first PCI-e slot doesn't interfere with them, but if you want to use 2 graphics cards then you are only going to able to use the four SATA II ports because the two 6 SATA III ports would be blocked by the second card. The board is also about 2" narrower than my old one, and there are no mounting holes on my motherboard tray at the very edge of the board, so installing things along the right edge of the board (i.e. 24-pin power cable, SATA cables, RAM in slots 3 & 4) cause the board flex quite a bit which I don't like. The other thing I couldn't find is any kind of CMOS jumper or reset switch. I know this isn't an enthusiast board so it isn't going to have an external reset switch, but I at least expected a jumper. Maybe I just missed it, I'll look things over again tonight. Also there is no onboard 1394, but that's not a big deal because I can't remember the last time I used a firewire device. And there also is no rear eSata connection, but the only eSata device I use is a portable drive which I connect via the front panel and I have that connected to one of the SATA ports. So again, not a deal breaker for me.

I was somewhat concerned about my HSF fitting because I have read some feedback where people had trouble fitting anything other than the stock cooler, but I didn't have any problem fitting my Zalman CNPS9500 cooler (using the ZM-CS5B adapter clip). It is a very close fit with the RAM (there is about 1-2mm clearance between the RAM heatsink and edges of the cooler heatsink), but it fits. And that was the only tight fit on the whole board, everything else was very well spaced out and laid out. I like that it has plenty of fan headers, too. Some of the 1155 boards I looked at only had 1-2 more in addition to the CPU header, and this one has three 3-pin headers and one 4-pin header. But I noticed that you don't seem to be able to control their voltages in the BIOS, but again I may have just missed it because I didn't spend much time going over everything since it was about 3am when I got finished setting it up.

So all in all, I'm pretty pleased thus far. The only thing I can say without a doubt is that if you're going to do a dual graphics card setup and you have more than 4 SATA devices, or you want to use either of the SATA III ports, then this is NOT the board for you. I have 6 drives total (4 HDD and 2 ODD), but I'm only planning on a single card setup so I'll be fine. And if you need a rear 1394 or eSata connection then you're going to have to use a separate card for that.
 
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is the bios set up like the review for the other P67 gigabyte boards have indicated, where it is cumbersome to OC?
 
As far as I know, Gigabyte has L shape SATA cable to install the SATA hard disk when using 2 graphic card.
 
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