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Hey check it out, we're going to be looking
at our first P55 board today from ASUS, the P7P55D Pro.
Good stuff, stay tuned. Check it out in a second.
Alright so here she is, the first P55 board I get my hands on.
We have an all new architecture, we got some new chips,
we've got the Core i5s and the new Core i7s for the socket 1156
and this would be the first Pro board from ASUS.
Now ASUS when they do the D over here, that's the high end board,
and the Pro means it's professional so it's not going to have
a lot of extras on it. It's not going to have overclocking stuff
but it does overclock and it has great hardware
for overclocking as well. It just doesn't have like the little push start buttons
and all this extra stuff that you're not really going to use
if you're going to use it in a professional sense
as in a workstation for editing, or as in a professional computer
that just needs to be fast. Now let's talk about this board.
First of all you are going to notice that it is a new socket again.
We are now working with the socket 1156.
This is going to take all your Lynnfield processors from Intel,
so your Core i5s and your Core i7s on that 1156 socket.
We also have a new memory configuration here.
You'll notice that there's not triple channel
like there was in X58, there's only dual channel
and that makes things a little bit more affordable for people
moving on from a let's say X48 or X38-based DDR3 system.
You don't have to buy extra memory, it's going to pop in here,
you just got to run it at the lower voltage
which the board will do automatically so that's really good.
You'll also note that there is no more northbridge
and that's because it's a whole new architecture for P55.
You pretty much have the P55 down here and it's the, it's called the PCH,
Platform Controller Hub. Basically that takes care of all the USBs,
all the SATA, all that good stuff. PCI Express goes directly to the CPU,
memory goes directly to the CPU. There is no QPI, it's a DMI,
Direct Media Interface and pretty much you bring it down
to two chips on the board, that makes things cheaper,
more affordable and it makes sure that everything else on the board
is even that much better. Now let's talk a little bit about PCI Express.
We have a lot of connectivity on this board.
As you can see there are three PCI Express x16 2.0 slots over here,
and the way these work, you actually get 16 lanes coming from a P55 board
or an i5 CPU. The way it works is x16s, so when you split these down to two
and you run either Crossfire or SLI, which the board is certified for both,
you're going to get x8 and x8. If you were to further bifurcate that down
you would get x8, x4, x4,
which wouldn't be your greatest idea for triple SLI,
but it will work, it will also work for triple crossfire x or what not.
You also have a two standard PCI slots,
and you have two PCI Express x1 2.0 slots as well.
So that's a lot of connectivity you have there.
You also have a lot of SATA ports on here.
Looking over here on this side you actually have four SATA ports right here,
and we have an additional two right there on that part of the board,
so that's six in total,
and these are all connected to the internal matrix manager technology.
So basically, these are going to give you rate zero, rate one,
zero plus one, one plus zero, and rate five through here.
You also have an additional SATA port right there,
that one's going to a separate controller,
I believe it's either a Marvell or a JMicron,
those are the ones that control this extra SATA port
and the E SATA that's also on the back panel, so that's important to have.
Now, speaking of the back panel,
let's go on a brief tour, show you what you got over here.
Couple PS2's, for your keyboard and mouse,
those are on professional boards just in case your using all your keyboard and mouse,
they are going to be there.
You have a bunch of USB 2.0's,
you got two, four, six, and then eight, on the back panel alone.
You have another six on the inside, via header.
You have S/PDIF in both coaxial and optical,
you have FireWire, you have E SATA,
you have ten, one hundred, one thousand Gigabit Ethernet right there,
and you have 7.1 channel HD audio with a really nice controller,
really nice signal to noise ratio, so it actually works very well,
you may not even ever really want to get an external sound card,
because it sounds so good with the built-in controller.
Now, there's a [inaudible] on these ASUS boards as always,
not as much as say a deluxe or premium model,
but the Pros are definitely a step up from the bottom.
And you do see it in this board first of all the layout is great,
it looks really nice, great choice of colors.
You also get a lot of great overclocking tools,
you get Japanse made solid caps,
so those are not going to pop on you.
You have great hardware, this board actually has 12 plus two phases of power,
so you have 12 phases for the CPU,
as you can see over here,
and you have an additional two just for the memory alone,
so that's going to be great for overclocking.
You also have a lot of FireWire connectivity on the board.
You actually have headers, you have two headers down here,
so that's an additional two FireWires you can add on.
You have a bunch of extra USB 2.0's for extra connectivity there.
You also have the IDE interface,
if for any reason you're still using an old IDE drive,
and you just want to plug in an old drive to get something off of it.
That connectivity is still there as well which is really good.
Now the board doesn't come with power, reset, and clear steam off buttons,
again because it's just a Pro, it's not the premier or the deluxe,
but a lot of people don't need that,
and also don't want it, you don't want to pay extra for it,
you want to get extra money in your GPU and your graphics
or in your case in your power supply.
Or get the fastest chip available at the time,
you want to go i7 over i5.
Whatever the case may be,
the board brings a lot to the table for the money.
It also has its very niche market of people that want to have the high-end
performance on the CPU, the memory and the GPU but they don't want to spend extra money
for features they're not going to use.
Now another interesting feature on here,
let's take a look right over here.
This is the MemOK button, that's interesting because
ASUS has always been known for their certified vendors,
for memory and a lot of chips don't work,
a lot of DIMMs don't work.
This chip is pretty much going to reboot your computer
and it's going to run a little program,
it's going to try to figure out what's going on with the memory,
and in turn may be compatible.
So you can now use any memory that you want on these boards.
Speaking of memory, another cool little item,
if you see right here these DIMMs,
they only have clips on one side,
so you don't have to take out your video card
or take out the memory chips anymore. It's genius.
You pretty much slide it into one side,
and it's a one touch push to get a DIMM in there, that's really nice.
On top of that, you also have the TurboV chip.
So that's a high end feature on this board.
TurboV is the hardware chip on these motherboards from ASUS now,
that lets you do hardware overclocking inside the operating system.
And it's not limited to just your base clock,
and a few other things, it actually gives you a whole host of voltages,
frequencies and settings that you can adjust,
as well as adjusting your memory, so that's very powerful as well.
Also, of course it is a ASUS board,
so you have Express Gate, which is an instant on,
or nearly instant on OS, it takes about five seconds to boot into,
it's a little mini Linux Distro.
You can get your email, Skype,
you can do voice calls, you can chat on the web,
you can look at a picture, and it does all of that without turning on
the rest of the computer to waste power.
It's basically just running off an embedded chip.
The other thing that you have to save power,
is the EPU system, automatically throttles your CPU and your memory down,
when you're not using the computer to save as much power as possible.
And that's pretty, that's pretty good stuff
for a board that's not really meant for an enthusiast,
it's meant for a high end regular consumer.
Those are a lot of really good features,
even features such as T-Probe,
which is something that you've only seen on the high end boards,
the newest high end boards.
T-Probe is actually a hardware that monitors how much,
it monitors the thermal loads and balances them
between all the VRM circuitry.
So sometimes even though you have 12 phases of power,
only like two will get really hot because they're doing all the work.
T-Probe is actually going to check those thermals,
it's going to measure the temperatures and it's going to spread it out more naturally,
that in turn is going to give you cleaner power,
give you better overclock,
to just a generally more stable system.
So really, really nice stuff, from this first P55 board that I got to get my hands on.
It's the P7P55D from ASUS,
and it you have any questions as always, feel free to email me, right here,
and I'll see you guys next time.
For more information on the ASUS P7P55D Pro Intel Socket 1156 Motherboard
type in A455-2913 into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For ComputerTV, this is Albert.