Budget Micro-ATX P55 Faceoff: Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 and ASRock P55M Pro

55 Comments

View All Comments

• Sunburn74 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  Thanks.
  Which board? I searched the thoughts section and don't see any mention of sleep :(
  
  I just know its a huge problem with gigabyte boards, pretty much every p45- and a good number of the x58 boards mysteriosly can't s3 sleep with significant overclocks in place and its something I'm seriously going to explore before my next mobo purchase.

• Ryun - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  I purchased and Asrock 760g, which is a great little motherboard, yet it does not support S3 state (standby mode). I have an email from Asrock's (surprisingly quick-response) tech support saying that none of their boards officially support S3 state and to use their Instant Boot technology instead.
  
  Did the Asrock motherboard you tested allow you to go into S3 state/standby mode? I really like Asrock's boards but the lack of standby is a deal breaker for me.

• Gary Key - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  S3 is fully supported on the ASRock board. In the power consumption section I did note what needed to be enabled for it work. Also, this was probably in the wrong spot, but in the OC section I briefly mentioned that the board had no problems resuming from S3 with the Bclk set to 215. I can understand why ASRock wants you to use Instant Boot, but S3 operation is just fine, even when overclocked.

• Ryun - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  Ah, looks like I missed that part. Many thanks for pointing that out. Sadly though, I don't have those BIOS options on the 760g board I have but perhaps I can tinker a bit more.

• n7 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  Just wanted to say a massively huge thank you for testing with 8 GB!
  
  It's extremely encouraging to see, as the large majority of reviewers do not bother testing with all slots populated.
  
  Thanx again.

• vlado08 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  Which board has the quickest Power On Self Test?
  
  With fast CPU's and SSD I expect fast booting!
  
  Now I have a Gigabyte board (P965 DS4) and when the Sata is in AHCI mode POST is quite long.
  
  I hope that in future articles you will include this information.

• MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  S3 is your friend. Really, who boots their computer every time any more?

• strikeback03 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  I usually do, since I dual boot and won't necessarily know which OS I need the day before.

• Gary Key - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link

  Cold Boot - Quick Boot turned off in BIOS - AHCI enabled, External Hard Drive attached via IEEE 1394a, LAN attached to our Promise NAS via a Gigabit Switch.
  
  Time reported is from the time we turn on the board until Win7 has correctly installed the network stack. So this is the full POST and OS is usable process that is being timed.
  
  ASRock - 44.7 seconds
  Gigabyte - 53.2 seconds
  
  I have the information since we run this for every board, just did not know if anyone would care to see it. ;)

• vlado08 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link

  Thanks Gary
  
  But I was interested in time from pushing the power on switch until the begining of the OS loading. I think that there might be difference between boards depending on their BIOS.
  Time from begining of the OS loading until fully functional OS depends on the computing power ot the CPU and the speed of the HDD (SSD) and not on the design of the board.
  And because you (we) want to distinguish between the boards I thought that this might be one of the criterion.