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The ASUS P7P55D-E Premium is based upon Intel’s P55 chipset. The LGA-1156 CPU interface has moved the PCI Express lanes to the CPU from the Northbridge where they were previously. This means that the Northbridge and Southbridge combination found in earlier motherboards has been replaced by the CPU+Platform Controller Hub combination. The memory controller on this new platform is on the CPU itself, meaning that the memory supported by the P7P55D-E Premium is up to DDR3-1333 (CPU). Faster speeds are possible and with overclocking the board can support up to DDR3-2200MHz memory. The ASUS motherboard also supports Intel’s eXtreme Memory Profiles allowing the memory to use the higher settings stored in SPD. The newest innovation to motherboards is the SATA 3 standard. For simplicity’s sake I will refer to it as SATA 6 Gb/second as SATA 3.0 Gb/second is sometimes confused with it. SATA 6 Gb/second offers twice the bandwidth of the previous standard. With the advent of Solid State Drives (SSDs) nearly saturate the SATA 1.5Gbit/second transfer rates of SATA 2.0, with the advent of the SATA 6 Gb/second interface flash read times are improved. I will test this out in this review. The second innovation that is present on the ASUS P7P55D-E Premium board is USB 3.0 standard ports. USB 2.0 which has been the standard for years has a maximum bandwidth between the USB device and the host controller of 480Mwgaibts/second. USB 3.0 offers data access of up to 4.8Gigabits a second which is nearly 10x as fast the earlier standard with the addition of a new feature of USB 3.0 called the SuperSpeed bus. Improvements have also been made to the power provided to the device (up to 900 mA instead of the 500 MA provided by 2.0. ASUS includes a bridge chip which uses the PCI Express 2.0 bus to provide up to 500MB/second bandwidth to both the USB and SATA innovations, allowing for higher bandwidth than provided by other solutions on the market with USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/second interfaces. ASUS’s Xtreme Design Hybrid series has a lot of innovations including 48 Phase Power design which combines ASUS’s Hybrid Phase+ a T.Probe chip which regulates the power when the motherboard is in use. The Ferrite chokes on the P7P55D-E Premium are numerous with 35 chokes surrounding the CPU Socket. The motherboard is designed with four 2oz copper layers which compares to the 2 layers found on some of the competition that uses 2oz copper layers and the layout is called Stack Cool 3, the successor to Stack Cool 2 found on earlier motherboard chipsets. The Premium motherboard has a Turbo EVO processor designed to automatically overclock the system when used in conjunction with the TurboV overclocking software included with this motherboard. The P7P55D-E Premium comes with a TurboV remote which handles overclocking much like a remote control for the PC. There are five buttons on the TurboV Remote. Three of them correspond to overclocking profiles that you set when programming the remote. Two buttons on the remote raise and lower the BCLK speed automatically. The Auto mode sets the Energy Processing Unit mode automatically. Q-Design is a logical evolution of their Q-Connector and Q-Shield for the FP I/O and I/O Shield of the motherboard. Q-DIMM allows insertion of the memory without using a lever meaning it won’t interfere with graphics card installation. Q-slot has a wider than normal lock for the graphics card, meaning you can press down on the lock and remove the card without hassle. Q-LED monitors the memory, the CPU, the graphics card, and the Boot device for device failure. A problem will cause a red light to turn on for the affected device. Contents:
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