ASUS P7P55D Deluxe Lynnfield Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

A well designed, feature-rich motherboard can easily be rendered mediocre by a subpar BIOS. Thankfully, as you will see below, ASUS has outfitted the P7P55D Deluxe with an intuitive, user-friendly BIOS. This is BIOS version 0720, which we used throughout our review.


Here we have full screen logo that appears everytime the system is powered on. Thankfully, it can be disabled for those who want to shave some seconds from the bootup time.


When we first enter the BIOS, we are presented with the Main tab, it lists the standard storage devices and some basic system information. This System Information section lists some rudimentary specification info, including the BIOS date & version, the type of processor and the amount of memory installed.


Anyone who has used a non-RoG ASUS motherboards knows that the Ai Tweaker tab is where all the fun happens. Once the manual option is selected in the Ai Overclock Tuner setting, the BIOS opens up to reveal all of the essential system clock control options: CPU multiplier, BLCK frequency, PCI-E frequency, memory frequency, QPI frequency, OC Tuner utility, memory timing options, and all the voltage options.


The OC Tuner utility is new BIOS-based overclocking feature that ASUS have implemented on their P7P55 series motherboards. It features three different profiles based on how aggressive you want it to be while selecting a proper overclock configuration. As you will see in our Auto Overclocking Results section, it proved to be a very impressive at achieving a high CPU frequency.


Once you select the DRAM Timing Control option, you enter a seperate sub-menu where the abundant primary and secondy memory timings are revealed.


The Advanced Tab is where you can enable/disable all the CPU-specific features like C1E, SpeedStep, Turbo Mode, C-STATE, as well as all the onboard devices like audio, LAN, FireWire, eSATA, etc.


The Power section contains the power management settings linked to the power-saving sleep modes, it allows you to enable/disable the new EuP standard, and it leads to the Hardware Monitor. The Hardware Monitor has very basic temperature & voltage reporting, and fan control functionality. We would like to see more voltage readouts, specifically VTT/IMC and vDIMM, which are absolutely essential for any overclocker nowadays.


The Boot tab is essentially where you set storage device priority and select the boot drive, where you can set supervisor and user passwords, and also disable the full screen logo.


The ASUS O.C Profile feature gives users the option to save and switch between BIOS profiles, for example an everyday profile and a benchmarking profile. Not only is this infinitely quicker than manually inserting every setting, but the profiles can be saved and shared among other P7P55D Deluxe owners. We are glad to see that ASUS have listened to our recommendations, and increased the number of profiles from a meager 2 to a more reasonable 8 profiles. The Tools section also contains the DriveXpert settings, which allow you to select between RAID-0 and RAID-1 on the light grey and dark blue SATA ports.


ASUS EZ-Flash 2 is a built-in utility that greatly simplies the BIOS updating process. You can easily update your BIOS from a ROM file located on your hard drive(s), USB flash drive(s), or even a CD. It's quick, painless, and it takes the worry out of BIOS flashing.