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- Date:
- Friday , March 12, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
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ASUS P7P55D-E Premium Motherboard Review
ASUS has updated its line up once again with yet another addition to the P7P55D family of motherboards. The P7P55D-E Premium brings the highly anticipated USB 3.0 and SATA 6G features to Intel's LGA1156 platform but what does that mean for the enthusiast?
Introduction
ASUS is world renowned for its innovative and numerous motherboard designs. It has offerings at virtually every price point imaginable to suit nearly anyone's needs. ASUS has vanilla offerings, Deluxe, Premium, and Republic of Gamers boards as well as workstation and server oriented boards. Its new "GENE" series of boards is making headway in the HTPC/SFF market and thus bolsters its already solid market share. As usual ASUS is among the first to bring new industry standards and features to market. The P7P55D-E Premium we are looking at today is yet another example of this as it offers both USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support.
The ASUS P7P55D-E Premium uses the relatively new yet mature P55 Express chipset designed for the "mainstream" market space. The board offers the usual array of features common to that chipset and the LGA1156 platform and resembles the P7P55D Deluxe we looked at a few months ago at first glance. There are a number of subtle changes, but only two of them are important. SATA 6G support and USB 3.0 support. The former is supported thanks to a Marvell 9123 SATA 6G compatible controller. An NEC controller provides USB 3.0 support. These features have been a long time coming and have been highly anticipated though honestly there is little reason to get excited about this just yet. At present there are very few peripherals or drives that can take advantage of these two features. Indeed at the time of this writing I did not have access to SATA 6G hard disk drives for testing (We have now secured full sets of Western Digital Black Caviar drives for testing). So unfortunately I can't do much other than talk about what SATA 6G should bring to the table. (We have held publication of this motherboard review so we could update it with SATA 6G / SATA III / SATA 6Gb/s or whatever it may be called. We will be supplementing this review with this article.) USB 3.0 on the other hand is something I was able to test thanks to an external hard drive designed to take advantage of the new interface. (More on this later.)
Our article on SATA 6Gb/s can be found at this link. Our article on USB 3.0 can be found at this link. You can also view the end of our recent 890GPA-UD3H Preview that shows off 4 disk RAID0 running on the new AMD board.
In order to handle the bandwidth required for all of this, ASUS chose to use PCI-Express x4 bridge chip to give them up to 500Mb/s of bandwidth. This actually falls short of the peak performance USB 3.0 is capable of, but it will still provide superior performance when compared to what was possible using USB 2.0 and SATA 3G devices. This configuration was necessary to deliver these features at this time because there are no competing chipsets from other manufacturers for the LGA1156/LGA1366 platforms. So without a "native" chipset based solution ASUS had to do something. ASUS' website even shows these features being available on all P7P55D boards. However most of them only support it with an added expansion card that ASUS sells. The P7P55D-E Premium and other "E" series boards have both these features actually integrated with the bridge chip on the PCB. Thus the PCB design is slightly different than it was on previous boards. However at a glance, they do look nearly the same.
The board also supports multi-GPU configurations as you would expect. After all any "Premium" board should support these features whether or not you plan to use them. NVIDIA's SLI and Quad-SLI technologies are supported, however 3-Way SLI is not. AMD's Crossfire and CrossfireX are supported in a similar fashion. In other words two way Crossfire, or CrossfireX using two physical cards is ok, but three cards is not. This is of course due to the expansion slot configuration and the P55 Express chipsets PCI-Express lane configuration. While the chipset supports up to 14 USB ports only 10 USB 2.0/1.1 ports are available. There are two USB 3.0 ports located on the I/O panel. They are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 standards.
ASUS has upped its game with their "Hybrid 48-Phase Design." This is no doubt an attempt to "slap" Gigabyte in the face for their recent 32 phase design. The motherboard game is literally a "one up" competition that never declares a final winner. In order to further "one up" Gigabyte, ASUS also went to using "2 Oz" of copper in its PCBs even though it had previously stated there was no benefit to this. (This whole feature started with ABIT many years ago.) Four layers of it, on an 8 layer PCB. The board also continues to offer PATA/EIDE support but the floppy and most other legacy ports have been dropped. The board still has a PS/2 keyboard port onboard, and it even features a COM port. Though no COM port connector is included in the box.
ASUS has a feature we haven't discussed a whole lot on some of their newer boards called "Express Gate." This is what I'd call a "fluff" feature. I say that because its usefulness is debatable. What the feature essentially does is allow you to use the machine for specific tasks without actually loading Windows. It is a very basic Linux OS which is built into the motherboard. You can use the system as a Skype terminal, access the internet, chat on the internet, play simple online games, or view photos. I'm not really sure how useful this feature is, but I do see some value in it as a diagnostic tool, or as a backup in case your system drive goes out on you. It certainly opens up support options so long as your internet connection is active. It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback customers give on the feature as time goes on. There used to be a feature on ASUS motherboards of days gone by that allowed you to use the system as a CD player without loading the operating system. I've seen similar features on other machines such as Compaq's Presario 1600 series laptops. That's reaching back a ways on both counts, but to make a point, none of those features are supported any longer by those product lines.
Following industry trends, the P7P55D-E Premium only requires a few components to create a fully functional machine. The required components are: LGA1156 CPU, DDR 3 memory, power supply, drives and a video card. ASUS Integrated the following components into the P7P55D-E Premium; 6 SATA 3G ports, 2 SATA 6G ports, 10 USB 2.2/1.1 ports (6 ports on the backplane, and 4 ports available via 2 headers supporting 2 ports each), 2 USB 3.0 ports, 2 IEEE1394 ports (1 via header, 1 via backplane), 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, six-mini headphone jacks, 1 SPDIF port, 1 optical output, and 2 PS/2 ports.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
The packaging is pretty much standard fair and is virtually identical to the packaging we saw on earlier P7P55D boards. The board is well protected during transit and inside the box you'll find the usual gamut of accessories. Manuals, cables, driver DVD, SLI bridge cable, Turbo EVO remote, SATA cables, zip ties, I/O shield, ASUS Q-Connectors, etc.
Board Layout
The layout of the P7P55D-E Premium is about as good as it gets. Normally I can nit-pick quite a bit on a board's layout. Even on the best boards I usually have one or two complaints. When I look at the P7P55D-E Premium nothing jumps out at me. There are things like the legacy CD audio header that aren't placed optimally, but those things probably won't get used anyway. The COM port connector is back there as well, but frankly, that's probably where you'd want it. You'd need to use an I/O bracket for that. So as far as complaints go, I've basically got nothing on the board's overall layout.
While the CPU socket is floating in a sea of power phases, it's really out there all by itself. There isn't anything that gets in the way of installing virtually any cooling solution I can think of. Test fitting of the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme showed adequate free space left. The MOSFET heat sinks are relatively low profile as well. Again I've got nothing but positive comments concerning the layout.
The P7P55D-E Premium uses DIMM slots that only have locking tabs on one side. These are nice because the problem of not being able to add or remove RAM when the slots are too close to the graphics card area are eliminated totally. These slots take some getting used to, but once you do, you can't imagine using the other kind on a board as cramped as this one. The P7P55D-E Premium has four DIMM slots and supports a total of 16GB of memory. ASUS claims that through overclocking, DDR3 2200MHz speeds are possible. Of course your mileage may vary. (Editor's Note: I have heard some rumblings in the industry as to the reliability of these "1 clip" DDR3 slots, but we have not been able to identify anything yet that points to them being faulty, so we are still liking these. A great feature if you are moving cards or RAM a good deal. And certainly it will allow you to change out your RAM without having to uninstall your video card.)
The north bridge is non-existent on this board as the features that the north bridge is normally responsible for are either integrated into the south bridge, or the CPU itself. The location normally occupied by the south bridge now does it all. Directly in front of the south bridge are the bulk of the SATA ports. The blue ports are your SATA 3G ports which are tied to the P55 Express chipset. The light gray ports are the SATA 6G ports. If you'll notice, two of the blue ports are on the board's edge and are the traditional 90 degree plug. The four on the forward edge in front of the south bridge are my favorite kind; locking ports that are parallel to the boards surface. The others are locking as well. As you can see, legacy PATA/EIDE support is maintained in the P7P55D-E Premium's design. As you can easily see in the second photo of the south bridge area, a third USB header goes unused. Why, I have no idea. LED's for Express Gate can be seen here as well.
The P7P55D-E Premium has what I'd call almost a perfect slot configuration. No it doesn't support 7 dual slot cooled graphics cards, but given the limitations of the P55 Express chipset and the LGA1156 CPUs in regard to PCI-Express lanes, this is about as ideal as things can get. Your two PCI-Express x16 slots are spaced out far enough apart. With two large graphics cards installed you still get one free PCI slot. At the very bottom you can toss a PCI-Express x1 device of your choice in without any fear of clearance issues. This is simply well thought out. Granted expansion slots and their configuration are subjective in that not everyone will find the same configuration ideal, but in my opinion, ASUS has done a fantastic job here. They've arranged a configuration that should make most people very happy.
The P7P55D-E Premium has 1 PS/2 keyboard port, 1 PS/2 mouse port, 2 IEEE1394 ports, 2 RJ-45 ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 6 mini-headphone jacks for audio, 1 optical output, 1 SPDIF out, and a clear CMOS button. I would have liked to have seen at least 1 eSATA port, but ASUS is stingy with those. They only seem to like putting them on boards with the word "Extreme" attached to their name in some form or fashion. Given that USB 3.0 stomps eSATA 3G in terms of bandwidth, I can overlook that easily.
TurboV EVO
ASUS continues to bundle TurboV EVO with their motherboards. The tool is basic and ultimately simplistic in nature, but it works well and has a great interface. It is easy to use but powerful enough to provide most overclockers with what they'd need to overclock successfully through Windows. You also get the TurboV Remote controller. With the appropriate software installed on the OS, you can toggle the bus speed of the board no matter what the OS is doing. We don't see any real reason for a seasoned enthusiast to actually use this thing, but to each its own.
The application defaults to manual mode. There isn't much there. You can load a preconfigured profile if you've made one. Additionally you can adjust four settings. BCLK, CPU voltage, IMC voltage, and DRAM Bus voltage. At the bottom of the application window, you will find a button marked "More Settings." Clicking here gives you quite a few more options. You can adjust CPU PLL, CHA DATA, CHA CTRL, CHB Data, and CHB CTRL. Next is the "Easy Mode" which only allows you to adjust via BCLK settings. You can adjust that up or down and that is all. Everything else provided is informational only.
The Auto Tuning mode basically gives you a flow chart and a start button. You can click on "More Settings" and additional options will be presented. Performance tuning, extreme tuning, flexible voltage, fixed voltage, DRAM frequency at 1333MHz or 1066MHz. The Turbo key function is basically for setting hot keys up for specific overclocking profiles. Again the utility is simple and easy to use. As far as included "tuning" software goes it's probably the best one on the market right now. I haven't found any bugs in it, and the interface doesn't suck. The utility won't allow you to set any overclocking records, but in my experience it's good for up to about 166MHz-180MHz BCLK.