WE‘VE ALREADY COVERED Gigabyte’s H67 boards, so today we’re going to look a bit closer at the company’s P67 models, except two of them don’t actually use the P67 chipset. Confused? Well, not to worry, it’s not as confusing as it sounds, but Gigabyte offers two PH67 models and the name gives away what they’ve done here.
The PH67-UD3 and PH67A-UD3 are based on the H67 chipset which apparently is cheaper than the P67 chipset, but there’s no display connectivity option on either of these boards, hence the PH67 branding. The boards are more or less identical to the P67 based P67A-UD3, in fact, until we have the full specifications, we can’t tell the PH67A-UD3 apart from the P67A-UD3. Well, we should find out what the actual cost difference is once the final boards launch, but we can’t imagine it being huge, since there are such minor feature differences.
The PH67-UD3 features two x16 PCI Express slots, although the second slot only has four lanes worth of bandwidth. There are also three x1 PCI Express slots and two PCI slots via an ITE bridge chip. Around the back there are no less than 10 USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, an Ethernet port and 7.1-channel analogue audio jack with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out. There are two additional headers for four more USB 2.0 ports, of which two support On/Off charge. Finally the board has a serial port header and four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps ports. The PH67A-UD3 features two USB 3.0 ports in lieu of two of the USB 2.0 ports and the same goes for the P67A-UD3 which sports the same board layout. All three models appear to have an 8-phase PWM design cooled by a single heatsink and all three models sport blue PCBs.
The first black PCB in the new range of boards is the P67A-UD3R which is more or less identical in terms of the physical layout to the P67A-UD3, although the R designation is suggesting RAID support, although we’d be surprised if the other models lack support for RAID, as it’s part of the Intel chipset. It’s got an additional USB 2.0 header and the PWM design has been upgraded to a 10-phase design with two larger heatsinks covering the MOSFETs.
This takes us on to the P67A-UD3P which again sports a near identical layout to the previous models, although Gigabyte has added a second USB 3.0 host controller for two front USB 3.0 ports. The PWM has once again been upgraded to a 12-phase design and although the heatsinks remain the same, they’re now connected via a heatpipe.
The P67A-UD4 is once again very much similar in terms of overall design to the P67A-UD3P with a few minor changes. For starters this board has a pair of eSATA ports around the back and the internal SATA connectors are now angled at 90 degrees rather than pointing straight up. This is also the first model that supports a dual x8 PCI Express slot configuration and SLI, something worth keeping in mind if you want to use two graphics cards, be it in CrossFire or SLI.
We’ve already covered the P67A-UD5 and P67A-UD7 in much detail here, so we suggest you check out the longer, more detailed version. We did include the press shots though, as they look a bit fancier than our own pictures of the boards and rightly so.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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