ASUS P7P55D Deluxe Lynnfield Motherboard Preview‏

A Closer Look at the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe

Enough with the paper specs, time to check out the product itself starting with a brief look at the package and accessories.


Here we have the shiny blue/purple-ish box that is the mainstay for nearly all ASUS Intel-based motherboards, but with one minor change: a flap. Although the box is already adorned with logos illustrating this model's numerous features and specifications, the flap has quite a bit of additional information about all of the interesting ASUS-specific features that the P7P55D Deluxe comes with. Essentially, if you take a few moments to look and read the box, you will know exactly what you are getting with this product.



The accessories bundle is a little light, but honestly there's nothing missing. There are six SATA cables, three of which have a 90-degree connectors and the customary IDE cable. There is the anti-EMI I/O panel and Q-Connectors, which make attaching the case cables to the system panel connector a much easier process. ASUS have also included an SLI bridge and a USB/eSATA PCI expansion bracket. Last, but certainly not least, is the one-of-a-kind TurboV remote, which allows for real-time system overclocking in coordination with the TurboV EVO chip. It also allows you to select Turbo Key and EPU profiles.


Without further ado, here is the P7P55D Deluxe in all its glory:


Upon first glance this motherboard's layout is...perfect. The 8-pin CPU power connector, overvoltage switches, 24-pin ATX power connector, IDE connector, SATA ports, USB and FireWire headers and onboard power/reset buttons are all ideally located on the edges of the motherboard. We definitely like the black PCB and it looks great with the new blue & white theme and the very low profile chipset cooler is quite striking as well.


The general CPU socket area on this motherboard is quite interesting. The LGA1156 socket and the retention module are both obviously new designs, but the truly eye-catching feature is definitely the 16+3 phase power design, as evidenced by the 19 sealed chokes. The MOSFET heatsinks are connected to each other by a heatpipe, and they are fairly low profile, so interference problems are highly unlikely with any well-designed CPU cooler. We are not too keen on the bucket load of capacitors so near to the CPU socket since it will make insulating the socket a tough job but few users will ever encounter this issue.


The DDR3 memory slots support overclocked memory frequencies up to DDR3-2133, however the truly impressive specification is the 4-phase power design. We are glad to see that the Q-DIMM memory slot design, which is clipless on one end, has found its way from the Maximus II GENE to this model. The reason for this innovative design is due to the fact that the clips would have come into contact with the back of the graphics card and would have made removal of the memory modules impossible without first removing the graphics card.


Around the memory slots is the MemOk! button, which can fix any compatibility issues between the motherboard and the memory and allow the system to boot. To the right of the MemOk! button is the TurboV EVO chip, a real-time hardware overclocking processor. Above the memory slots are the new overvoltage switches for the DRAM, the Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) and the CPU, which allow you to unlock higher voltages in the BIOS...but remember that these unlocked voltages are insanely high, so be careful. By the way, the use of switches for this feature has made the P7P55D Deluxe a jumper-less motherboard.


The P7P55D Deluxe features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports, which are supplied by the P55 chipset. The dark blue and light gray SATA ports are provided by the popular JMicron JMB322 controller, which also plays a role in the Drive Xpert RAID 0/1 feature. A JMicron JMB363 controller, which is hidden under the heatsink, supplies the black SATA port and IDE port.

Speaking of the chipset heatsink, we like its low profile and interesting design and look forward to testing its cooling capabilities.


The overall expansion slot layout and assortment is excellent. There are three full-sized PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots, two PCI-E x1 slots, and two legacy PCI slots. In a single graphics card configuration, the blue PCI-E x16 slot will operate at the full x16 speed, while the black slot will run at x4. When two graphics cards are installed in the blue and white PCI-E x16 slots, they will operate at x8 each with the black slot once again operating at x4. This motherboard does support Quad-GPU CrossFireX and Quad-GPU SLI with two dual-GPU graphics cards. Attempting to run three graphics cards would be pointless for gaming purposes since the third card would run at x4 and thus be a huge bottleneck.However, if you partake in Folding@Home, you could feasibly run three graphics cards on this motherboard without issue.

Below the expansion slots are the always welcome onboard power and reset buttons, and you can also spot the socketed BIOS chip. This is a good design choice since ASUS can simply ship you a new BIOS chip should an update go terribly wrong. However, we would prefer to see two BIOS chips since that would prevent any downtime.