Let's start off by taking a quick look around the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 motherboard.

From left to right: PCI Express x1 slot, PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot with x16 bandwidth, and another PCI Express x1 slot. The next white slot is a legacy PCI slot. The light blue slot to the right of that is another PCI Express x16 slot. This is followed by the second white legacy PCI slot, and the third light blue PCI Express x16 slot, with x4 lanes of connectivity. Along the bottom edge of the motherboard are COM, FDD and firewire connectors.

In the lower left corner we find a two-digit PORT 80 display here, along with the front panel header and an EIDE controller for connecting PATA devices.

Port 80 display for troubleshooting while overclocking.

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 6Gb/s SATA ports to the mix which can be run in RAID 0 mode, care of the Marvell SE9128 storage controller.

Six DDR3 memory slots are available for population on the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 motherboard.

The GA-P55A-UD6 uses 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.