Let's start off by taking a quick look around the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R motherboard.

From left to right: PCI Express x1 slot, PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot with x16 bandwidth, and a pair of 32-bit PCI slots. The next light blue slot is a x16 PCI Express slow with x4 lanes of bandwidth. The last two white slots are more legacy PCI slots.Along the bottom edge of the motherboard are audio, COM, LPT and FDD connectors.

In the lower left corner we find the P55 Express PCH behind a small passive heatsink. The P55 Express PCH has six 3Gb/s SATA II ports which can run in RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 modes. Gigabyte adds another two 3Gb/s SATA controllers to the mix which can be run in RAID 0, 1 and JBOD modes.

Plenty of space between the two PCI Express x16 slots for dual-slot wide videocards.

Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD3R supports up to 16GB of DDR3 800/1066/1333MHz (and 2200MHz when overclocked)memory in four DIMMs. Along the bottom edge of the board is the ATX 24-pin power connector and IDE connector.

The GA-P55-UD3R is one of the first motherboards to use Intel's 1156-pin socket. This new socket requires an 1156-pin Core i5 700-series or Core i7 800-series CPU, as well as a new size-compatible cooler.

Dual eSATA ports on the rear IO make connecting external storage drives the PC much easier.

Let's see how far we can push the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R motherboard when paired up with an Intel Core i5 processor. Overclocking is up next!