Feedback and Suggestion

[Bongkie]

I am planning on getting a GA-P55A-UD4P board with a i5 750 processor and a Kingston HyperX KHX1600C8D3K4/8GX ( Quad Channel Kit ).

My question is do you think this three parts will fit to each other?
Or should I get a GA-P55-UD4P instead of GA-P55A-UD4P?
I Read the manual of P55A and there is something i don't really understand here what it says.. ( Turbo SATA3 / USB3.0 (Marvell 9128 /NEC USB 3.0 Controller)
Determines whether to set the PCIe speed of the Marvell 9128 or NEC USB 3.0 controller to PCIe Gen 2. Please note that when only one graphics card is installed on the PCIEX16 slot, it will operate at up to x8 mode if either one of the two controllers is set to PCIe Gen 2. The two controllers will be automatically set to PCIe Gen 1 when two graphics cards are installed on the PCIEX16 and PCIEX8 slots.

Auto Lets the BIOS automatically confgure this setting, depending on the device installed.
(Default)
Turbo SATA3 Sets the PCIe speed of the Marvell 9128 controller to PCIe Gen 2.
Turbo USB3.0 Sets the PCIe speed of the NEC USB 3.0 controller to PCIe Gen 2.
Disabled Disabled forces the Marvell 9128 and NEC USB 3.0 controllers to PCIe Gen 1.)


The real story of this setup is i will send money to my brother who lives in the U.S. and he will buy me this setup and he will send it here in the Philippines.

I think this is a NO ROOM FOR MISTAKES because it will be TOO EXPENSIVE for me if i will return the parts to the U.S.

Thanks in Advance!
Bong

[Peteruk]

Did you ever stop to think about the warranty or if it is DOA? so you say “NO ROOM FOR MISTAKES” theirs two but odds of it not working are low so your choice.

It seems GIGABYTE are stopping the GA-P55-UD4P or at least newegg has not stocked that one for some time to replace it with the GA-P55A-UD4P so you might as well go for that one.

In order for the SATA3 / USB3.0 to run at full speed it links up with the other x16 PCI-e 2.0 slot and makes both x16 PCI-e 2.0 slots run at x8 by x8 as if you had two graphics cards but this can be disabled so SATA3 / USB3.0 to run at full speed is limited allowing one graphics card to run at x16 PCI-e 2.0 full speed.

Like the RAM kit    

[Bongkie]

Yes i know about the warranty but i have no choice because i can't buy that parts here in the future even if they got that kind of parts here i guaranty it will not be price friendly. About the DOA my brother will test that part before he send it over to me.

Thank YOU very much for your reply

[UD6]

Nobody can give you an advice in respect of warranty. Even if the board works today it might not do it anymore tomorrow  It is good that you understood that SATA3/USB3 with this board comes at a price. To me it is more an advertisement joke as so many banners on the box... SATA3/USB3 has future. But not with so many ifs. In addition to this hard to get devices at a reasonable price. And SATA3 - too bad that the HDs cannot use this speed today (just for the interface) - only SSD could use it. So what... In the future a board with so many restrictions when you want to use SATA3/USB3 will be pretty useless. Better buy a new one then without restrictions. At least this is what I think.

The memory might require special BIOS settings that it works at the rated speed or in the worst case at all. Look at the Kingston site for information. Also check the manual how you have to enter them (the slots) so that they work. People seem to like not to read this and enter them in the wrong order.

I would not spend so much money on memory but more on the CPU. The additional memory performance will bring you next to nothing in reality.

You should make sure that you have at least two sticks so that the memory can work in the faster dual channel mode. But if you buy more than 4 GB you should have a 64 bit OS otherwise they will be useless. And anyhow - most people do not even use more than 2 Gb with their system. They just think more is faster. That is really true - but only if the software needs it. I run a lot at the moment and I use 1136 MB on WinXP SP3 with 4 GB - this with pagefile (always) off.

[Bongkie]

Nobody can give you an advice in respect of warranty. Even if the board works today it might not do it anymore tomorrow  It is good that you understood that SATA3/USB3 with this board comes at a price. To me it is more an advertisement joke as so many banners on the box... SATA3/USB3 has future. But not with so many ifs. In addition to this hard to get devices at a reasonable price. And SATA3 - too bad that the HDs cannot use this speed today (just for the interface) - only SSD could use it. So what... In the future a board with so many restrictions when you want to use SATA3/USB3 will be pretty useless. Better buy a new one then without restrictions. At least this is what I think.

The memory might require special BIOS settings that it works at the rated speed or in the worst case at all. Look at the Kingston site for information. Also check the manual how you have to enter them (the slots) so that they work. People seem to like not to read this and enter them in the wrong order.

I would not spend so much money on memory but more on the CPU. The additional memory performance will bring you next to nothing in reality.

You should make sure that you have at least two sticks so that the memory can work in the faster dual channel mode. But if you buy more than 4 GB you should have a 64 bit OS otherwise they will be useless. And anyhow - most people do not even use more than 2 Gb with their system. They just think more is faster. That is really true - but only if the software needs it. I run a lot at the moment and I use 1136 MB on WinXP SP3 with 4 GB - this with pagefile (always) off.

Hey UD6,

Thanks for the reply! You really got a point about that sata3 and usb3. So what P55mobo can you recommend to me ( make sure it is price friendly  )?

I will use this for 3D Max so i think 8GB of ram is still not enough and i'm using a x64 OS.. Oh i'm also using this setup for heavy games


PS. I still have three weeks to decide so any suggestions will be WELCOME

[UD6]

I cannot recommend anything since I don't have the total overview about all boards on the market. I have the UD6 and I am not so happy. It is not so much the board but all the special features that exist mainly on paper - or on the box. DES2 on WinXP creates just a chaos and I had to reset the BIOS to get back to normal and uninstall it, eSATA never worked so far and others say it works only after a downgrade to WinXP SP2 and so on. Gave up to waste more time on it even if the board has a special eSATA controller. Might be the board, might be the OS, might be the external enclosure.

But on the other hand the board did not burn down and it does at least pretty much all the normal things that my old board did. What is a problem are the useless PCIe slots as soon as you try to use more than one of them or what happens with eSATA if you use more than one of them and so on. Too many ifs even without USB3 and SATA3. On top of this the UD6 has 6 memory slots - you can only use 4 of them. So more an optical feature...to get customers not reading the restrictions - the ifs.

Somehow I have the feeling - there is a lot on the box of the board but little on the board itself when you know what I mean. So I cannot recommend it.

3D Max might use a lot of memory. With games I never had a problem with my 3.5 GB and I have the latest games. With Windows 7  64 bit I was not so happy - Sony Vegas 64 for video editing was even slower than with XP 32 bit. So 64 bit is not always better. Mostly it just enables more memory but also disables some 32 bit software...