ASUS P7P55D Deluxe Preview

Every motherboard manufacturers are jumping onto the P55 bandwagon but only the first tiermakerslike ASUS and Gigabyteare able to get ahead of competition due to early chipset access and strong R&D team. Judging from the slew of P55 boards previews on the internet, it seems ASUS is the most ready of all after sending out P7P55D EVO a couple of weeks agoand now the P7P55D Deluxe.

The key differences between the EVO and the Deluxe version lie in the power phase design and audio aspects where the former sports 12+2 phase, 8 channel audio while the Deluxe sports 16+3 phase, 10 channel audio and includes a Turbo-V remote control. Also, Delxue version is able to allow memory overclocking up to DDR3-2133 through their Hyper DIMM support.

The entire range of P7P55D including thisDeluxe versionis part of ASUS' Xtreme Design initiative aimed to take on its arch rival, Gigabyte Ultra Durable 3 design. If you are interested in the marketing talksbetweenthe big guys, you can take a look at this article to find out more about Xtreme Design.

The CPU surrounding is free of unwanted obstruction so that leave you enough space to mount a huge cooler on it. You can clearly see the 16+3power phase designhere and that will make a more stable uncore overclocking for Core i5/i7 processors. ASUS uses atechnology called T.Probe which is an intelligentmicrochip toload balance between all the power phases to prevent hot spots built upon some phases only.

The single chip P55 chipset covered by a low profile sink provides support for 6 SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports (6 ports at mid-board and 8 at back panel) as well as RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 through Intel Rapid Storage Technology. There are another 3 SATA 3.0 Gb/s portsprovided by the JMicron JMB322 and JMB363 controllers. Orginally, there are plans for Marvell 6G controller but was scrapped due to drivers issues.

From theback panel, there are Dual GbE LAN ports powered by Realtek 8112L and 8110SC chips, IEEE 1394a port, HD Audio panel powered by VIA VT2020 10-ch audio codec chip, CMOS clear button, Coaxial / Optical S/PDIF out ports.

One ofthe neat featureis theMemOK! button thatallows the board to boot even if there are compatibility issue between the board and the memories. There is a red LED indicator that will light up if there is an issue and user will just have to press the button toload the safe memory timings from the BIOS.

For hardcore oveclockers, you might want to tinkle around with the OV DRAM, OV IMC and OV CPU switches that remove the voltage limits in the BIOS andallow you to setthem even higher.

ASUS really makes overclocking extremely easy and safe on this board and this is possible through a combination of hardwareand software methods. There is a TurboV EVOchip onboard to work with TurboV EVO (OC tuning software)with Auto Tuning supportandTurboV Key (turns your power button into OC button). To go one step further, ASUS even bundle this board with TurboV remote control thatallows you to overclock your system real-time when playing games or running applications without the need to exit the program. You can even pre-set some OCprofiles and load them up instantly or increase the BCLK 1MHz at a time.

To show how overclockable this board is, from ASUS internal testings, it seems the Lynnfield 2.93 processor can be easily overclocked to 4.67GHz on air using the BIOS settings below :

CPU Ratio:24
BCLK: 194
DRAM: DDR3-1940
Vcore: offset +0.25V
Vimc: 1.4V
Vdimm: 1.65V

As for memory OC showcase, the G.SKILL DDR3-2200 (F3-17600CL9T-6GBPS) 2GB x 2 Dual Channel can be overclocked to DDR3-2552 using the below BIOS settings :

CPU Ratio:21
BCLK: 212
DRAM: DDR3-2544
Timing: 10-10-10-30-2N
Vcore: offset +0.25V
Vimc: 1.4V
Vdimm:1.7V

We would love to try it out ourselves soon too so stay tuned.