Gigabyte Technology, one of the world’s leading mainboard makers on the planet, on Tuesday unveiled its new P55A family of mainboards that feature rather exclusive capabilities, including USB 3.0, Serial ATA-600 as well as boosted power for demanding USB devices.

Gigabyte P55A family of motherboards is based on Intel P55 core-logic set and supports Intel Core i5 or Core i7 central processing units (CPUs) in LGA1156 package, dual-channel DDR3 memory, two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots for graphics cards, improved power supply circuitry for CPU, solid-state capacitors and other generally typical peculiarities of high-end platforms.

The main advantage that Gigabyte P55A mainboards provide is called “333 Onboard Acceleration”, which is a set consisting of NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 controller, Marvell 88SE9128 Serial ATA-600 controller as well as ability to boost power supply for USB-powered devices by three times.

At present there are not a lot of devices that take advantage of Serial ATA-600 or USB 3.0 devices (one external USB 3.0 drive from Mitsubishi as well as several SATA-600 drives from Seagate), but going forward more and more products will start to incorporate new interfaces, which will allow owners of Gigabyte P55A motherboards to seamlessly upgrade their hard drives or peripherals and improve performance of their systems while ensuring 100% compatibility. Moreover, ability to boost USB output wattage should allow even the most power hungry devices, which might have been designed not in accordance with USB standards, to work correctly.

“Gigabyte is excited to be able to introduce our latest 333 onboard acceleration technologies on our market leading P55 platform. Through close cooperation with several industry leaders including NEC Electronics Corporation, Marvell, and Seagate, Gigabyte is able to provide our customers with several next generation data transfer and storage technologies that will have a far reaching impact on how people interact with their digital media for many years to come,” said Tony Liao, associate vice president of marketing at Gigabyte.

Gigabyte positions its P55A-series of mainboards for technology enthusiasts and overclockers. Memory circuitry of the motherboards has been optimized for speeds up to 2200MHz and higher, besides, the board naturally features a set of instruments to overclock microprocessors as well. Moreover, Gigabyte’s GA-P55-UD6 motherboard currently holds the world’s record highest memory frequency of 3459.6 MHz.

Gigabyte P55A family will include seven mainboards. Pricing of the platforms will depend on exact configuration as well as region.

Tags: Gigabyte, USB