A sneak peak at Gigabyte's P67A-UD7

Atomic swung by Gigabyte's headquarters the other week and had a chance to get the lowdown on the company's flagship Sandy Bridge motherboard.

There are motherboards, then there are enthusiast motherboards, and then there are ridiculous motherboards. In recent times motherboards like EVGA's Classified SR2 and Gigabytes X58A-UD9. These boards often don't fit into normal cases, support ridiculously powerful hardware configurations like Quad-SLI and are never intended to sell in massive volume.

What they are is partly marketing weapons and partly testbenches for the next generation of products. Gigabyte's UD9, for example, has 24 phases of power. This is great for an overclockers board, and a step beyond everything the company had put on lesser boards. But when we swung by Gigabyte's headquarters in Taipei the other week we were stunned to see that the entire power design of the UD9 has made its way onto the P67A-UD7 board for Sandy Bridge.

The UD7 is a pretty amazingly featured motherboard. It will support three way SLI or Crossfire thanks to PCI-Express lanes provided by an NVIDIA NF200 chip. By going for three-way SLI instead of four Gigabyte has been able to ensure that the motherboard will fit normal ATX cases.

The I/O panel has dual Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA and   has 18 USB ports, a chunk of which support USB 3 thanks to a combination of NEC controller chips and four port USB hub chips from VIA. Even better, all these ports have their own fuses so if you plug in something dodgy it will only take out a single port rather than cause wider damage.

This shouldn’t be a problem with USB, but the rise of smartphones and tablets have meant USB ports have become an important source of recharge juice. Various manufacturers have tweaked USB ports to supply more power, and Gigabyte has a tech it calls 3x USB Power that pumps enough juice into specific USB ports to charge an iPad. When you start doing stuff outside spec like this, fuses become a really good idea.

Chatting with Gigabyte's engineer revealed a few more things about the P67A-UD7. Gigabyte is using a new heatsink for the Sandy Bridge boards. It is set back from the CPU in order to make it easier to access chunky coolers. This includes Liquid Nitrogen Pots, which should sit happily over the CPU on these boards (although rumours are that LNO2 has issues with the new processors).

As for the choice of black over the traditional blue, this is a nod to the system builder market. By making the boards look sexier, they make the view through a case window much better. No more blue underlying largely black components. Lower end boards like the integrated graphics H67 one will still sport the blue PCB.

We also asked what Gigabyte was doing about UEFI (The lack of movement on the BIOS replacement has been a long term frustration for this writer). It seems that for now the BIOS will stick around on Gigabyte's boards, but engineers have implemented a partial UEFI solution that will fix the most pressing problem. This is a special UEFI loader that interfaces with the BIOS. It allows drives that uses 48-bit LBA addressing and supports drives up to 144 Petabytes in size. It also importantly supports booting from drives formatted with GPT – which is core to enabling the growth of 3TB plus drives in the market.

We have taken some shots of the naked board that was shown to us at Gigabyte HQ and have also received the production model from Gigabyte. Check out both of them in our Gallery, and relish all those nice blue USB 3 ports.

Update: Gallery now with the missing USB ports shot.