Layout

With the P67A-UD4 - as well as with its bigger brother the P67A-UD7 - Gigabyte finally got the courage to change the design of their boards completely. Therefore the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer now uses a black PCB as well as black expansion slots. If you look at the heatpipe you see that the UD4 features anthracite bodies with blue anodized elements. Finally there are also some white spots which aren't distracting at all. We've been very positively surprised of Gigabyte presenting such a beautiful motherboard. Generally the layout leaves a well structured impression. The PCI-Express x16 slots for example have been positioned perfectly. There is plenty of space between the slots but dual or even triple slot graphics cards won't block the connectors at the bottom edge.

The P67A-UD4 comes with a 12 phase power design which guarantees stable current supply and good overclockability. Furthermore the 12 phase VRM design is equipped with high quality polymer capacitors which have a life expectancy of 50'000 hours on average, low RDS(on) MOSFETs for lower temperatures and high quality inductors made of ferrite.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the P67A-UD4. Officially supported are DDR3-2133/1866/1600/1333/1066 with up to 32 GByte capacity. The DIMM-slots are quite close to the CPU socket which might cause some compatibility problems with big coolers especially when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders.

The Southbridge has been equipped with a passive cooling block and the Northridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks.