i5 with Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3

I

infra1

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Hey guys,

I've been searching high and low for an official review of the GA-P55-USB3 by Gigabyte, but I can't seem to find a single review!

The only negative thing I found out about this board was the PCI-E lanes clock a lot slower when using dual graphic cards. This isn't much of a concern for me as I do not have any plans to use two video cards.

Having said that, I appreciate any feedback regarding this board. For the same price-point, are there better boards?

I've always been an ASUS guy because I've had a good streak with their boards. But Gigabyte is getting better every year and I hear the GA-P55's have great overclocking potential with the i5 750's, which is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for solid OC'ing, stability, and reliability.


This leads me to my second dilemma. Which memory modules would be a good suitor for the board? I've read people having great success with the G.Skill Ripjaw series, but I'm not entirely sure which variation of the Ripjaw series people are referring to.


Cheers guys and I'm looking forward to the feedback :)
 
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First and foremost, spend the extra $5 for SATA 6GB/s with this Gigabyte mobo:
$125 - Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 Intel P55 ATX Motherboard

Second, in the General Hardware subforum, we've been recommending this RAM a lot with the above Gigabyte mobo:
$105 - G.Skill Ripjaw Series F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 RAM

Third, I highly recommend the above Gigabyte mobo. It's of good quality and is one of the best bang for the buck P55 mobo out there.
 
Danny Bui,

Thank you very much for your suggestions. Very good call on the GA-P55A-UD3 recommendation.

I'll do some more research on the board.

Not to hijack my very own thread but what's you feel for the general overclockability of the combination of hardware as per your suggestion?


Cheers!
 
I have the above combo and it's performing wonderfully for me : )

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Nice OC psilence!

It'll be nice to jump from an E6600 @ 3.3ghz to an i5 at 3.? :)

What cooling solution are you using for your CPU? Did you lap?
 
infra1 said:
It'll be nice to jump from an E6600 @ 3.3ghz to an i5 at 3.? :)
Click to expand...
Well it depends on your usage scenario. What exactly will you be doing with this PC? If gaming, which games and at what res?
 
I've been running the GA-P55A-UD3 with the i5-750 for a few weeks now and am very happy with my choice (given my budget). I have not overclocked so I can't speak to the P55A-UD3's capability in this regard. One thing to keep in mind is that use of SATA III or USB 3.0 will limit your capability to use multiple video cards (you mentioned this above but I wanted to clarify). As I understand it, your options are:

1 card at 8x, USB 3.0 and SATA III
1 card at 16x (and optional second card at 4x), USB 2.0 and SATA II

From what I understand, 8x should be enough for most cards. If you need two GPUs, your budget is probably high enough to spring for a better-featured motherboard anyway.
 
Well it depends on your usage scenario. What exactly will you be doing with this PC? If gaming, which games and at what res?
Click to expand...


I've got to power x2 27" Dell's at 1920x1200. So I game at the native resolution.

I'll be using it primarily for gaming, but I do code and do media encoding as well. I pretty much play the latest and greatest, in terms of games. I've been on a Bad Company 2 binge as of late.
 
infra1 said:
I've got to power x2 27" Dell's at 1920x1200. So I game at the native resolution.

I'll be using it primarily for gaming, but I do code and do media encoding as well. I pretty much play the latest and greatest, in terms of games. I've been on a Bad Company 2 binge as of late.
Click to expand...

Then you'll definitely notice the performance upgrade. :D
 
jipe said:
I've been running the GA-P55A-UD3 with the i5-750 for a few weeks now and am very happy with my choice (given my budget). I have not overclocked so I can't speak to the P55A-UD3's capability in this regard. One thing to keep in mind is that use of SATA III or USB 3.0 will limit your capability to use multiple video cards (you mentioned this above but I wanted to clarify). As I understand it, your options are:

1 card at 8x, USB 3.0 and SATA III
1 card at 16x (and optional second card at 4x), USB 2.0 and SATA II

From what I understand, 8x should be enough for most cards. If you need two GPUs, your budget is probably high enough to spring for a better-featured motherboard anyway.
Click to expand...

jipe, thanks for this update. This is certainly something to keep in mind. Although I feel USB 3.0 will take some time to go mainstream, I am however concerned a little bit about the SATA III bringing down the lane speed to 8x. So in reality, if you want 16x on a single video card, you'll have to do away with the USB3/SATAIII right? I suppose the ultimate point, as you brought up, is whether or not 8x will be sufficient vs. 16x.



Danny Bui said:
Then you'll definitely notice the performance upgrade. :D
Click to expand...

For sure :)

I basically got a good price for my old CPU/Mobo and figured if I put it off, I'd only get less for my old hardware. So what the hey right? Out of pocket costs for me to upgrade will be about $250 CAD to an i5 configuration, which isn't all too shabby in my opinion.
 
infra1 said:
Nice OC psilence!

It'll be nice to jump from an E6600 @ 3.3ghz to an i5 at 3.? :)

What cooling solution are you using for your CPU? Did you lap?
Click to expand...

Thank you!

I'm using a Megahalem Rev. B, x1 S-FLEX SFF21F, and Arctic Silver 5. I didn't lap the heatsink or the CPU. Load temps for everyday use are 41c, and stress tests max at 58c. I'm definitely happy with it. It's all in an antec 300 case.
 
psilence said:
Thank you!

I'm using a Megahalem Rev. B, x1 S-FLEX SFF21F, and Arctic Silver 5. I didn't lap the heatsink or the CPU. Load temps for everyday use are 41c, and stress tests max at 58c. I'm definitely happy with it. It's all in an antec 300 case.
Click to expand...

I'll have to see how my temps fair. I'm using an Antec P180.

I'm not a big fan of stock cooling solutions, but I have a Zalman CNPS9500 (lapped) that I think will fit the socket 1156 board. Not a bad HSF, but I wasn't impressed with the finish on the underside of the heatsink itself. It was actually pretty rough to be honest. After a good lap, it looked (and performed) a lot better.

I'm actually inspecting my "brand new" E6600 HSF right now. It actually doesn't look half-bad ;)
 
infra1 said:
I'm not a big fan of stock cooling solutions, but I have a Zalman CNPS9500 (lapped) that I think will fit the socket 1156 board.
Click to expand...

Do you have a 1156 bracket for that Zalman HSF? If not, it won't fit on any 1156 mobo.
 
Ah is that so eh? Looks like the later revisions of my CNPS9500 comes with this bracket. I suppose I'd have to order the bracket.

Not wanting to spend $60+ on a new HSF, I think I'll grab this bracket as this should do the trick no?
 
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infra1 said:
jipe, thanks for this update. This is certainly something to keep in mind. Although I feel USB 3.0 will take some time to go mainstream, I am however concerned a little bit about the SATA III bringing down the lane speed to 8x. So in reality, if you want 16x on a single video card, you'll have to do away with the USB3/SATAIII right? I suppose the ultimate point, as you brought up, is whether or not 8x will be sufficient vs. 16x.
Click to expand...

I came across this article which indicates a 4% performance loss from 16x to 8x with the 5870. Any lesser cards are unlikely to saturate the 8x lane, so unless you're dropping over $400 on a video card, your graphics shouldn't be bottlenecked even if you use SATA III.
 
jipe said:
I came across this article which indicates a 4% performance loss from 16x to 8x with the 5870. Any lesser cards are unlikely to saturate the 8x lane, so unless you're dropping over $400 on a video card, your graphics shouldn't be bottlenecked even if you use SATA III.
Click to expand...

jipe, thanks for the article. Quite a performance hit when at 4x. What you're saying makes sense. I'm currently using a BFG 275 GTX OC @ 720/1296. Not a bad card, but I plan to upgrade to a mid-range 400 series card as soon as they are available, but I do have an appreciation for the ATI's as of late.
 
Gentlemen,

I've got my GA-P55A-UD3 with i5 750 up and running.

I'm using the G.Skill Ripjaw Series F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 RAM as per Danny Bui's suggestion. I'm also using the bracket for my CNPS9500 ($5 CAD), which saved me from having to get a $60-80 (CAD) HSF.


I had some BSODs while installing Windows 7 64-bit. I found out my BIOS version was F2. I've updated to F6 and that seem to fix my problem. Looks like the memory modules weren't supported on BIOS F2.

So far so good! Battlefield Bad Company 2 seems to be running a helleva lot better now and I'm no longer getting slow down during heavy firefights, physics, smoke, etc. Seems all cores are operating at about 75% capacity whilst in game.


Taking some time getting used to the MOBO options in the BIOS. Lot of options, which is good. I'm glad this motherboard is properly using CPU fan control based on my CPU's temperature; it's so much more quiet now when I'm just doing simple stuff on the machine :) I have no idea what was up with my P5N32-E SLI which was leaving the fan in overdrive, even if I was playing solitaire lol.

I do have some questions about the board.


1. Is there a good overclock guide that is specific to the GA-P55A-UD3 and i5 750 that you would recommend?

2. I can't seem to disable the "downclocking" (speedstep) via BIOS. My CPU adjusts to 1199Mhz when not doing cpu intensive work and jumps appropriately to 2.66ghz. Do you guys have your CPU's working at maximum speed or do you leave your CPU to clock up/down as per task at hand? I thought I disabled speedstep in the BIOS but I think there is another option that's causing the CPU to downclock.

3. Temperatures - This is a very very messy subject, I know. But CoreTemp is reporting my temps rather low in my opinion. Cores are at about 18-23 degrees celsius on idle. The TJMax value is set to 99 degrees Celsius. I tried researching but couldn't find anything conclusive with the i5's. I'm not horribly hung up on temperatures, but it would be nice to have a good approximation when I overclock. So what is the appropriate TJMax offset?


Cheers guy!

I'm loving the new i5 :)
 
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I believe the setting you want to disable is the C1E state
Personally, I don't see why you wouldn't want to turn it off. You save power, since you're not using all the clock cycles anyway
 
Evaders99 said:
I believe the setting you want to disable is the C1E state
Personally, I don't see why you wouldn't want to turn it off. You save power, since you're not using all the clock cycles anyway
Click to expand...

True enough. I'm not hellbent on disabling it, but I'm curious if it effects stability if you've overclocked your processor.
 
Glad you're enjoying the new system. I still can't believe my i5 is four times faster than my old dual-processor setup, yet uses 1/3 the power. I like to pretend it runs on magical sprinkles (don't ask questions, just go with it). Seriously though, I haven't overclocked but I've been looking into it. The good news is, the 750 is popular for overclocking and there are a lot of guides online:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-750-overclock,2438.html
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/09/21/overclocking-intel-s-core-i5-750/1
http://techgage.com/article/overclocking_intels_core_i5-750_i7-870/
http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i5_750_overclocking_guide,1.html

The TechGage article uses a higher end Gigabyte board (UD5), but I'd think the BIOS would be very similar. I'm partial to Tom's Hardware as they usually focus on practical issues (e.g., how much power is that 4.2ghz OC costing you?). Anyway, good luck, and if you find any other good resources, feel free to share them.
 
What intrigues me is, assuming that all 750's are equal to a degree, that if a 750 can get up to 3.0ghz no problem, why are they clocked at 2.66ghz? Why not 2.8 or 3.0? Again, assuming all i5's are equal to a degree (i.e. 100/100 processors can run at 3.0ghz with no issues).

Maybe Intel wanted a slim i5 selection so not to interfere with their i7 product lineup?
 
Probably to avoid cannibalizing their high-end sales. If they sell the 750 at 3ghz, they have to bump up the 860, and the 920, and so on, and at a certain point the expensive CPUs are going to be running really hot for minimal performance gain. Also, this way the default power consumption is a selling point? My guess is they tried to find the optimal point for performance/power consumption and then adjusted it up/down for different price points. Dunno, just a guess.
 
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What setting do you guys recommend having the 'QPI Clock Ratio' set at? Auto/32x/36x?
 
I'm at 3.8ghz right now.

Ambient: 43C (This is 15 minutes while CPU is underload)
Load temp: 74C (highest of all 4 cores as per Real Temp)

QPI Clock Ratio - 32x
Memory Ratio - 8x (1600Mhz)

VCore - 1.29v
QPI/VTT - 1.15v
PCH - 1.05v
PLL - 1.80v
DRAM - 1.56v (you'd probably need 1.60-1.63 if you are using 1333mhz ram)

-C1E disabled
-EIST ENABLED
-Turbo disabled



Prime95 (Small FFT) running close to 20 minutes now with no crash. Hardly a lengthy period of time to declare the system stable, but it's a start.

I want to drop the vcore a little more and I think I can get away with dropping the DRAM a little lower as well. What's your take on the QPI/VTT being at 1.33v?


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I have the P55A-UD3 w/ the i5 that I just picked up from Fry's. Gotta say Im loving it. Stable @ 1.28v @ 4ghz (200x20). I believe Ill be stable @ 1.264v, but I need a little more QPI voltage (only at 1.21v right now I believe).
 
Nice doz!

Could you share your BIOS configuration with us?

I'm running at 3.8 and I'd like to confirm it stable. I upped the memory multiplier to 8x (1600mhz effective) and ran Prime95 for close to 9 hours. Solid as a rock thus far.

My voltage is actually a little higher than what you have, but I'm convinced I can drop my voltage a bit more, so I'm going to run another prime95 test later on tonight. After vdroop, I'm at 1.28v with load-line calibration on; so in the BIOS it's about 1.29v. If I have LLC off, I get rounding errors in Prime95.
 
Nice to hear these results, I just picked up this combo from frys for $243 after tax - $15mir.
 
I just set up this cpu/mobo this weekend also.
19 X 200 3.8ghz
1.30 vcore
1.30 qpi/vtt
1.9 pll
1.12 pch
1.64 dram
32x qpi ratio
8x mem ratio

power saving options are on, turbo off, loadline enabled.

temps hit 80c with a zalman 9500, gotta go order something else...also will try dropping my vcore and vtt a bit.
 
I just picked the P55A UD3 up with the Corsair ram in the combo deal and so far it clocks very well. I'm shocked at how well this cheap board performs.

I have been looking around and can't find any info on some aftermarket sinks for the mosfets. I would love to throw a couple of HR-09s on them. A couple of enzos would work too, They worked well and looked great on my P5Q Deluxe.
 
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dccmadams said:
I just set up this cpu/mobo this weekend also.
19 X 200 3.8ghz
1.30 vcore
1.30 qpi/vtt
1.9 pll
1.12 pch
1.64 dram
32x qpi ratio
8x mem ratio

power saving options are on, turbo off, loadline enabled.

temps hit 80c with a zalman 9500, gotta go order something else...also will try dropping my vcore and vtt a bit.
Click to expand...


dccmadams, I've got the same cooler retrofitted to my 1156 socket. What are your ambient temps? That's rather high. Average temp under load is 72/73C for me. Still think it's high, but I plan on lowering the vcore voltage. I'm planning on getting another cooler anyway.

Try refitting the heatsink. The Zalman CNPS9500 fastening bracket (2 screws on either end) becomes bent which results in weakening the contact between the HS and CPU. Try giving it a bend the other way (don't bend too hard) then refasten the HSF. When in place and fastened down properly, you shouldn't get much movement (i.e. if you grip the HSF and try to rotate clockwise/counter-clockwise).
 
Im just running base settings. 200x20, 1.2912 VCore (bios), 1.264 (windows), 1.24 QPI, 1.84 PLL, 1.66v DRam, everything else AUTO. 32x QPI, 2:8 memory, LLC enabled.

I hit 66c LOAD w/ a Corsair H50 in LINX, never go above 55c in daily gaming/tasks.
 
doz said:
Im just running base settings. 200x20, 1.2912 VCore (bios), 1.264 (windows), 1.24 QPI, 1.84 PLL, 1.66v DRam, everything else AUTO. 32x QPI, 2:8 memory, LLC enabled.

I hit 66c LOAD w/ a Corsair H50 in LINX, never go above 55c in daily gaming/tasks.
Click to expand...

Right on. Thanks doz.

I've been advised that if you are running 1600Mhz RAM, it's okay to leave your voltage at 1.56v. Seems 1.66v is a little high, but then again I'm no expert.

I'm trying to find the right QPI VTT voltage. I'm going to run Prime95 with the following voltages:

QPI/VTT - 1.15v
PCH - 1.12v
PLL - 1.80v
DRAM - 1.56v

I'm going to lower my vcore, but I don't know the exact number yet. It's at 1.28 after vdroop.
 
infra1 said:
dccmadams, I've got the same cooler retrofitted to my 1156 socket. What are your ambient temps? That's rather high. Average temp under load is 72/73C for me. Still think it's high, but I plan on lowering the vcore voltage. I'm planning on getting another cooler anyway.

Try refitting the heatsink. The Zalman CNPS9500 fastening bracket (2 screws on either end) becomes bent which results in weakening the contact between the HS and CPU. Try giving it a bend the other way (don't bend too hard) then refasten the HSF. When in place and fastened down properly, you shouldn't get much movement (i.e. if you grip the HSF and try to rotate clockwise/counter-clockwise).
Click to expand...

I think the clip has a good bit of spring in it. All seemed ok. The ambient temp in his room is pretty high. I have a box folding right next to this one. I ordered another hs that I use on my main rig. Hopefully, that will get temps down.
 
dccmadams said:
I think the clip has a good bit of spring in it. All seemed ok. The ambient temp in his room is pretty high. I have a box folding right next to this one. I ordered another hs that I use on my main rig. Hopefully, that will get temps down.
Click to expand...

Yeah that will do it. My clip wasn't holding the HSF very firmly to the CPU so I just gave it a bit of a tweak. Either way, I hope to pick up a Noctua NH-U12P SE2 today. Looking forward to lower temps and lower noise.


FYI - My Prime95 test failed last night with the voltages I mentioned above. Comp crashed during test. I disabled ALL power saving options this time and I'm going to try it again with the same voltages.
 
Is your ram rated for 1.65? If so I would recommend upping the voltage to stock.
 
doz said:
Im just running base settings. 200x20, 1.2912 VCore (bios), 1.264 (windows), 1.24 QPI, 1.84 PLL, 1.66v DRam, everything else AUTO. 32x QPI, 2:8 memory, LLC enabled.

I hit 66c LOAD w/ a Corsair H50 in LINX, never go above 55c in daily gaming/tasks.
Click to expand...
How do you like that little mini-watercooling loop? How much of a difference does it make over the stock cooler? I've been eyeballing it as my temps are horrible under load in my Mini P180 case.
 
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