GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD3 ATX Intel Motherboard

Comment:
This is a budget board so there's no point complaining about its overclocking capability. It gets the job done well with a 2500 and 4go ripjaws X ram.

Comment:
Provides all the basics expected of a board in this pricerange.Do not purchase it if you intend on overclocking. The voltage drooping issues will force you to use far more voltage to achieve the same overclocks of other motherboards (although, they are more expensive). The pricier models in the same series all have features that I didn't need so I figured I would be fine with this board.. well I was wrong, since this is the only gigabyte P67 motherboard with this severe of vdroop. 1.4v in BIOS will droop down to as much as 1.33v under heavy load even with loadline calibration enabled. As of yet there is no BIOS fix from gigabyte for this - if it can even be fixed (possibly a hardware issue of not having enough VRMs). Requiring 1.4v to get 4.5ghz on an i5 2500k really killed this board for me.

Comment:
I set this board up with an i5 2500, 8 GB of G.Skill Ripjaws X and a GTX 570. It will not be overclocked, therefore I was more interested in a stable board than one that could push the processor speed. So I can't comment on it's overclocking ability. It's primary purpose is for use with FSX, therefore the quantity of USB ports was important for plugging in all the flight controllers, etc. It has a couple quirks, one being the size of the board. It's height is shorter than any ATX board I've ever used. The mounting holes on the top edge don't line up with the mounting positions in the case, so the top edge of the board doesn't have any support. It wasn't a problem, as the board is very stiff, but I'm pointing it out. The other odd thing is if you have the optical drive as the first boot device there is a delay in the booting process. It hangs for a few seconds with a screen "Loading Operating System" and then boots normally. This doesn't happen when the HDD is selected as first boot device. I've never seen this type of delay in other boards. The setup was easy, including a bios update. I would think this board should satisfy most users requirements. A lot of performance for a little money.