Gallery - the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe motherboard

Gallery -  the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe  motherboard

You know, it's always cool and mystifying when you receive an early sample .. after unboxing instantly we were impressed. That's a hot looking feature rich motherboards alright. Nice black PCB, blue'ish coloring schema and the usual complementary products ... among them is actually a remote control.

Overclocking with a remote -- this remote is part of the Turbo V concept which we'll explain about more in a final review. The remote will allow you to utilize three presets to auto overclock your platform by 3% to 7% or setup saved profiles that you have created. Nothing really extreme though, but it does give you some extra performance on the fly. What is nice is the fact that Bclk (bus speed) frequency can be changed in real time. The EPU engine can also be manipulated in real time with this device.

Though its a cool feature, unless you cool and overclock with Liquid Nitrogen on the fly, we think that most users will seek one overclock setting and stick to that (at BIOS level). So this probably is a little bit of a gadget. But it's cool.

So here we have the motherboard itself, it's an impressive looking motherboard alright. Though pricing on P55 motherboards still needs to be announced we expect this one be sit in the 200 USD price range. Some of the more notable features:

• ASUS make use of a VIA VT6308P chipset for IEEE 1394a support
• Sound is managed by VIA VT2020 (BD192/24 ENVY HD) 10-channel HD audio codec (8+2 Streaming) with support for DTS Surround. We really like to see  something other than Realtek for audio, actually I love this choice.
• Realtek, this baffles me ... Who did ASUS not utilize the native Intel Gigabit LAN support in the P55 ?  Realtek 8112L/8110SC Gigabit LAN controllers are used for LAN Ethernet.

The board features 14 USB 2.0 ports (six headers/ eight ports on the I/O panel) and support for up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory with standard BIOS support up to .. and get this DDR3 at 2133 MHz (!). ASUS also included power-on/reset/clear CMOS switches for more convenient overclocking.