Final thoughts and rating
The excellence of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors takes a lot of the marketing headaches out of promoting the supporting chipsets: you want Sandy Bridge goodness, you simply have to invest in a 6-series motherboard.
Gigabyte's range of supporting boards is currently split between the H67 and P67 chipset. Starting at £70 for the barest H67 and rising to £270 for the super-deluxe P67, there's a board to cater for all budgets. The reviewed P67A-UD3 retails at £100 and offers a reasonable feature-set, though, understandably, a trimmed-down board layout misses out on higher-end features such as a UEFI BIOS, SLI compatibility, FireWire and eSATA support. Compare this with, say, the ASUS P8P67 LE, which throws in a separate SATA 6Gbps controller, FireWire and eSATA for just a little more.
Enthusiasts looking towards the cheaper H67 chipset will do well to remember that a P67 board is required to get the most out of the Sandy Bridge chips, and Gigabyte's board - outfitted with adjustable multiplier support - cranks up a Core i5 2500K to 4.4GHz without any semblance of difficulty. What's more, it's energy efficient too.
Spending around £100 on a P67 chipset-based motherboard enables the enthusiast to wring out the last bit of performance from Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs. Gigabyte's P67A-UD3 stakes a claim as the budget P67 board of choice. Solid performance and impressive overclocking credentials are offset by a tired-looking BIOS and a substandard PCIe lane arrangement for graphics. Worth putting on a shortlist if it dips much below £100.
The Good
Overclocks sweetly
Low price for a P67 board
The Bad
No UEFI BIOS
Strange PCIe lane arbitration
Auto-overclocking utility not the best
HEXUS Rating
Gigabyte P67A-UD3 motherboard
HEXUS Where2Buy
The board can be purchased from Scan.co.uk.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
