The area south of the CPU socket (typically where you expect a northbridge to be located in older generation motherboards), has the nForce 200 and PLX bridge chips. This is cooled by a fusion heatsink which can be connected to a water-cooling loop. It can also offload heat from the CPU VRM and PCH heatsinks. Of the ten internal SATA ports, six are 3 Gb/s ports provided by the P55 PCH, two 3 Gb/s ports from a Gigabyte GSATA2 controller (which also gives out an IDE connector), and two 6 Gb/s ports from a Marvell-made controller. Other features include two color-coded blue USB 3.0 ports, several USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, two gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and 8-channel HD Audio with optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs.
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD7 motherboard design unveiled
Posted on Monday, January 25 2010 @ 21:53 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
TechPowerUp got their hands on a photo of the upcoming Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD7 motherboard, the final version of the motherboard has a number of notable changes from the pictures that circulated on the web a couple of months ago. The retail version features four PCI Express x16 slots instead of three, and features several design changes.