Expansion consists of two PCI Express x1 slots, a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot with x16 bandwidth two legacy PCI slots and one PCI Express x16 slot with x8 bandwidth and a third PCI Express x16 slot with x4 lanes of connectivity. A special note about this last PCI Express slot: if configured in PCI Express x4 mode, it will disable the GA-P55-UD6's eSATA ports and PCI Express x1 slots, since all of these peripherals share bandwidth.

In the lower left corner we find the supplementary SATA controllers underneath a small passive heatsink and 10 3GB/s SATA jacks. There's also a two-digit PORT 80 display here, along with the front panel header and an IDE controller for connecting PATA devices. Along the bottom edge of the motherboard are COM, FDD, firewire and USB headers.

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, and uses a secondary JMicron JMB632 controller for two more SATA 3 Gb/s ports that can also run in RAID 0, 1 and JBOD modes. There is no 6GB/s SATA on this particular motherboard, for that look towards Gigabyte's GA-P55A models.

Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD6 motherboard supports up to 16GB of DDR3-800/1066/1333/2200 memory in six DIMMs. Along the bottom edge of the board is the ATX 24-pin power connector and handy power button.

Intel's LGA1156 CPU socket for Core i5 700-series or Core i7 800-series processors.

The heatsinks on the GA-P55-UD6 are compact, dissipating heat through use of fins. Certain expansion cards in the first PCI Express x1 expansion slot may have height clearance issues with the Intel P55 Express chipset heatsink.

Let's see how Gigabyte's work with the GA-P55-UD6 has affected its overclocking potential...