The P55 PCH - Platform Controller Hub

The P55 PCH - Platform Controller Hub

To understand the product we'll be reviewing today, let's first discuss the heart if it, the P55 PCH. The P55 chipset itself and the Lynnfield processors embargo is finally lifted. The P55 motherboard chipset is just one chip, no more North and Southbridge. Interesting to learn is that the P55 chipset connects to the processor directly through DMI (Direct media interface) interface bus, and that's different from X58 where it connects directly to the QPI link.

• X58 = QPI bus LGA1366, 2 QPI links, 3xDDR3, plus power.
• P55 = DMI bus, LGA1160/1156, 1 DMI link, 2xDDR3, PCI-E connections, plus power.

The P55 chip has embedded a lot of righteousness in it: we see an all-time first integrated PCIe controller for 16X or two eight-speed PCIe cards, when it comes to input / output capabilities we are talking about support for 14 USB 2.0 ports with integrated USB 2.0 Rate matching hubs, 6 SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports and an integrated Gigabit LAN Ethernet.

The chipset will also supports Integrated Clocking Buffer Through Mode, provides Thermal Sensor Data via SMBUS for discrete Fan Control Solutions and Intel Matrix Storage Technology 9.0. New Intel matrix storage has a new user interface for managing all storage related tasks, support for RAID 0,1,5 and 10, Rapid recover technology.

DDR3 wise 1333 MHz is supported straight out of the box, but running the memory at 1600, 1866 or even 2000+ MHz should be no issue either. Speaking of memory, with the arrival of Core i7 870, 860 and i5 750 Intel made the decision to go back to a dual-channel memory interface. Don't get too worried here; the controller is so much faster than the old limited FSB based controllers. You'll have 64-bit memory wide controllers which are connected directly with the processors silicon. As a result this design brings a bandwidth utilization of as much as 90%, a nice jump from the FSB based 50-60% utilization for sure.

In this review we'll be using a 1600 MHz DDR3 Corsair Dominator memory kit. Corsair provided this kit specifically for this review. It is horribly sweet memory as its arranged as 2x4 = 8 GB of memory.