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

Audio-

We are planning on taking an in-depth look at all of the current on-board audio codecs and compare them to a couple of discrete audio cards from ASUS and AuzenTech in the near future. In the meantime, we will provide a quick overview of the control panels from the two competing solutions today and a quick subjective analysis.

ASRock utilizes the VIA VT1708S 8-channel audio codec on the P55M Pro motherboard. To be honest, I had low expectations of this particular chipset. In actuality, it is a decent competitor to the Realtek ALC 888B utilized by Gigabyte. In fact, VIA has made great progress in their driver set and at this point I firmly believe the actual implementation by the motherboard manufacturer in regards to shielding is more important to audio quality than the any potential differences between the two chipsets.

That said, VIA has a very good control panel and option setup, certainly more so than Realtek in this particular case. The most beneficial item is the equalizer as you will need it for music playback. Midrange performance on this chipset is lacking depth and highs at times sound tinny. Both chipsets scored about even in Rightmark’s excellent Audio Analyzer software test suite with THD+ numbers slightly favoring the Realtek solution.

Unfortunately, my ears thought the difference in quality between the two solutions was a bit greater. The main problem with the VIA solution as implemented by ASRock was background noise that was directly attributable to electrical shielding problems on the board. In headphone mode, I could hear a slight background hum that would rise and fall with load activity on both the CPU and storage subsystems. It was very slight, but just enough to be noticeable in several classical and jazz soundtracks. It was also present in several games, mainly simulations and RTS games where there is not constant gunfire present in most first person shooters.

Gigabyte utilizes the Realtek ALC 888B 8-channel audio codec on the P55M Pro motherboard. Audio quality in music was better than the VIA VT1708S thanks to clearer midranges, but highs were still leaned on the tinny side and bass was even between the two chipsets.

Otherwise, I preferred the Via solution in games and movie playback, not by much, but channel separation was slightly better. Of course, if you really want better analog output a good discrete audio card is the solution. For most of us, either of the audio solutions will suffice, but thanks to the lack of background noise, we will have to give the Gigabyte board the win here.