还记得前不久我放出的技嘉下代黑色PCB的UD3和UD3R产品吗？
现在UD7也来了，虽然不知道UD9在哪里，也不知道技嘉的“G1 KILLER”在哪里，不过～
很帅，很多PCI-E插槽，很神秘～技嘉下代UD7终于露脸了～
Intel's new line of Sandy Bridge processors will soon be upon us. The chip
giant has already confirmed that its next-gen CPU architecture will launch on
January 5, just over one month from now. Motherboard makers aren't waiting for
the new year to show their Sandy Bridge wares, though. Earlier this month,
we got an early look what Asus has in store for Intel's new hotness. Today, it's
Gigabyte's turn. Late last week, the company's high-end P67A-UD7 motherboard
arrived at my door, and while I don't yet have a CPU to pop in, I was able to
snap a stack of pictures of the board.
The first thing you'll notice about the UD7 is that it eschews the shade of
turquoisey blue that has been a hallmark of Gigabyte motherboards for as long as
I can remember. Black is the new turquoise, at least in this case, and the fresh
aesthetic is nicely complemented by heatsinks draped in pewter and gold tones. I
dig the new artistic direction, although part of me misses the distinctiveness
of the old color scheme. Strip Gigabyte's name from the board, and one could
easily mistake it for something from Asus, MSI, or just about any other
motherboard maker.
for Sandy Bridge CPUs. Around it, Gigabyte circles a whopping 24 power phases.
More phases lead to cleaner power delivery and higher overclocking potential, or
so the marketing literature says. More interestingly, the board is capable of
switching into a 12-phase mode that alternates between two sets of a dozen power
phases each. The UD7 will switch phase groups each time it's booted, spreading
the load for folks who don't need all 24 phases active at once, which is pretty
much everyone who isn't sitting next to a canister of liquid nitrogen.
Gigabyte's usual brand of demand-based power-phase scaling works with both 12-
and 24-phase modes, and the power delivery system as a whole meets Intel's
latest VRD 12 specification.
should point out that Gigabyte is using fancy new MOSFETs on the UD7. Usually,
discrete high- and low-side MOSFETs are accompanied by a separate driver chip.
On the UD7, so-called "driver MOSFETs" consolidate that three-chip combo on a
single piece of silicon. In addition to saving board real estate, this approach
is said to improve efficiency and lower temperatures. Gigabyte claims a drop in
MOSFET and choke temperatures of 16° and 27° Celsius, respectively.
We don't yet know how the memory controller embedded in Intel's Sandy Bridge
CPUs performs, but it's definitely a dual-channel design. Each of the UD7's DDR3
DIMM slots can accept up to 4GB of memory, and the manual says memory speeds are
supported up to 2133MHz.
To the left of the DIMM slots sits a row of Serial ATA ports, half of which
conform to the latest 6Gbps SATA spec. Starting from the left, the first four
ports are actually old-school 3Gbps ones tied to the P67 chipset. Intel's new
chipset only has dual 6Gbps SATA ports, which appear here in white. To their
right sits a couple of additional 6Gbps SATA ports fed by a Marvell controller.
A second Marvell chip is also tasked with supplying next-gen SATA connectivity
to the dual eSATA/USB jacks that populate the rear port cluster.
all kinds of SuperSpeed USB connectivity. There are a total of 10 USB 3.0 ports
onboard: six here, plus internal headers for another four. All of them are fed
by a pair of two-port NEC controllers, although there's obviously a considerable
amount of sharing going on. Each NEC chip has a direct line to one of the rear
USB 3.0 ports. The second USB port on each NEC chip is connected to one of two
VIA hubs that split things four ways. One of those hubs supplies the rest of the
rear ports, while the second feeds the onboard headers.
split between the rear cluster and additional onboard headers. Realtek supplies
the hardware behind the Gigabit Ethernet ports and the audio jacks.
chip can be found tucked under one of the UD7's heatsinks. The NF200 takes PCIe
lanes from the CPU and divides them evenly between a pair of full-bandwidth x16
slots. The NF200 can also spread the lanes across all four of the board's
physical x16 slots, giving them eight lanes of connectivity apiece.
configs to single-slot cards, which is a bit of a drag. However, the NF200 does
have another trick up its sleeve: Turbo USB 3.0 mode. Normally, the board's USB
3.0 controllers are linked to PCI Express lanes attached to the P67 chipset. As
such, they must share limited interconnect bandwidth with other devices, such as
Ethernet and Serial ATA controllers. Turbo mode sidesteps that potential
bottleneck by moving the USB controllers over to PCIe lanes branching off the
CPU.
early look at Gigabyte's P67A-UD7. Rest assured that this is but the first in
what will no doubt be a torrent of new motherboards to arrive at the
Benchmarking Sweatshop in the coming weeks. You can expect more in-depth
motherboard coverage, complete with all sorts of benchmarks and performance
analysis, when Sandy Bridge arrives in January. In the meantime, feel free to
peruse the high-resolution board shots in the image gallery below.<IMG pid=articleendgraphic alt=TR
src="http://techreport.com/img/articleend.png">
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