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ASUS’s new board is based upon the Intel P55 Express Platform Controller Hub. One major difference between this PCH and earlier motherboard chipsets is that all of the graphics card PCI Express lanes are on the CPU and not on the Northbridge which is not needed on the motherboard as a result. The Lynnfield CPUs have 16 PCI Express Generation 2.0 lanes for graphics with an additional 8 lanes available through DMI. ASUS says that the P7P55D Premium is the world’s first motherboard to support SATA 6 Gb/second drives. There is an ASRock board that has an add-in card included to support SATA 6 Gb/second drives, but this is the first board on the market to have it natively on the board itself. ASUS’s board has two of these connectors, which effectively double the bandwidth versus the SATA 3 Gb/second interface. This interface gets enhanced scalability, faster data retrieval and double the data rates. One key feature of this chipset is the ability to run either Quad SLI or Quad Crossfire. As the motherboard can only split the two x16 slots into x8/x8 mode, 3-way Crossfire or SLI is not supported. Both NVIDIA and ATI support dual-GPU graphics cards in the form of two GTX 295s or two HD 4870 x2s, meaning that four graphics chips can be installed on the motherboard. ATI will soon release a HD 5870 x2 card that will likely offer the best possible performance this year from graphics cards. ASUS includes their own hardware OC processor on the board just like the P7P55D Deluxe board. Auto-Tuning overclocks the system to the fastest stable clock speeds. Turbo Key is a single button push overclocking tool (Power Button by default) that overclocks by touching the button. If you want to overclock manually with settings for BCLK, FSB, Voltages and memory the TurboV application gives you full control of the overclocking and tweaking of the board. ASUS also includes a TurboV remote that you can use to overclock, activate Turbo Key, and adjust the Energy Processing Unit settings via the remote controller.  ASUS logo ASUS calls their design philosophy on their P55 boards Xtreme Design. The first part of this feature is the 48 Hybrid Phases which consists of 32 phases for the vCore and extra 3 phases for the memory controller inside the CPU. ASUS uses high-quality components with lower RDS (on) MOSFETs, Ferrite core chokes with lower hysteresis loss and 100% Japan-made high quality conductive polymer capacitors. The T.Probe is a microchip that detects and balances power phase loads and temperatures in real-time. ASUS also uses all 100% Japan made solid capacitors on this motherboard. Another feature that is common to ASUS motherboards of the P55 chipset is the inclusion of their Express Gate SSD OS. ASUS includes a small Solid State Drive which contains a small Linux based OS on it. This allows the end-user to browse the Internet, a Skype VOIP client, a chat client based on Pidgin and StarOffice which is a free Office-like application. The Express Gate software is loaded right after the BIOS on boot and can cause the system to boot to the OS within 5 seconds instead of the minute or more that booting to Windows might require. ASUS has a 512MB SSD on the motherboard which holds the Express Gate OS. Contents:
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