As the world’s largest producer of motherboards, we are accustomed to seeing broad and feature packed boards from ASUS. Therefore we’re anything but surprised to learn about the flagship for the LGA 1156 platform and Intel’s Lynnfield processors, but it did make us slow down for a bit. As the King of the Hill of ASUS Intel P55 family, which has eight members, P7P55D Premium offers pretty much anything you can imagine with a motherboard, and then some.
The processor support includes Intel’s new Core i5 and Core i7 processors of the Lynnfield family, but also other coming LGA 1156 processors. The Intel P55 chipset supplies most of the features of the board, with everything from 12 USB 2.0 ports, 2 PCIe X16 slots for dual graphics cards and loads of SATA II ports with many different RAID configurations possible.
ASUS has went beyond what most would expect from a motherboard with the P55 chipset. It ships with 10 channel audio from VIA and 6 internal SATA II ports, but also two SATA 6Gbps ports. The support for next generation SATA interface will only be available with P7P55D Premium, from ASUS at least.
Marvell has solved the problems with the 88SE9123 SATA 6Gbps controller and connected via PCIe x4 there is plenty of bandwidth.
We HAVE to mention the power circuitry of this board though, it consists of no less than 32+3 phases, which makes Gigabyte’s otherwise impressive 24-phase system look pale and weak. We are not counting on any enormous performance or stability improvements thanks to this, but ASUS certainly shows that it means serious business with P7P55D Premium.
This is also reflected by the price tag of $270, which is high as the middle child of the Lynnfield processor family, Core i7-860. But if you want the (seemingly) best …
