Gigabyte P55 UD5 and UD4P motherboards spotted

TweakTown spotted the GA-EP55-UD5 and GA-EP55-UD4P motherboards at Gigabyte today, you can check out some detail photos over here. The main difference between the two boards is that the GA-EP55-UD4P has less memory slots and a less advanced power phase system. Some interesting features of these two boards include SATA III support, power over eSATA, Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) slot and Gigabyte Smart TPM. The latter one is a new piece of software that will enable you to secure private files and folders with a USB drive or a Bluetooth-enabled device like a phone.

We will start off with the GA-P55-UD5, the high-end mainstream board with Intel Core i5 support. Before we begin, keep in mind that this board is by no means finished and is purely a R&D sample which will go through many changes before it is released later in the year when the first Core i5 processors start selling. The board we can see here is actually a P57 motherboard as it includes an Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) slot, which adds flash memory to the system to speed up access times and improve performance. This will not be supported by the P55 chipset.

One of the major points of interest with the P55 based UD5 mobo is that it has - get ready for it - a grand whopping total of 24 CPU power phases. That ought to be enough to push your Socket 1136 based Core i5 mainstream processor through the roof and partly up into space, we think.