Asus P7P55D Evo LGA-1156 Motherboard Preview

Specifications
The specifications and main features that any motherboard has, decide not only how successful it’s going to be, but who it’s aimed at. This is designed to be a mid-range socket 1156 board, between the Deluxe and standard boards and as Intel continues to remind us, the i5 range is designed to replace the mid range Core 2, so the board’s features and specifications must be suitable. Aside from the obvious socket and chipset change over the x58 boards we are familiar with, the observant amongst you will have already noticed that this board has four DIMM slots instead of the usual six. This is because the P55 Express chipset supports dual-channel DDR3 instead of triple-channel DDR3 of x58. It easy to see why Intel decided to go this way, it’s currently very common to have dual-channel ram on a motherboards these days so it’s an easy sell to most people who will be upgrading from socket 775 setups or older. While triple-channel DDR on the other hand is a new concept, not a radical one we admit but something new, so Intel have kept it simple and left this feature for the high end market. This is of course not forgetting that the very lack of one or two modules in ram kits will make them more affordable, perfect for a mid-range setup. Memory support on this board is good, with a max of 16Gb over four modules and speeds up to 1600 (OC), with 1333Mhz and 1066Mhz obviously also supported.

The rest of the board specification wise is fairly standard for something at this mid range level, you have 6 SATA 3Gb/s ports and another two with RAID support, Dual Gigabit LAN connectors, 8 channel (7.1) HD Realtek onboard sound with Optical and Coaxial S/PDIF output. You also have a huge number of USB 2.0 ports with 8 the back panel and another 6 from headers on the board itself, along with two of the faster but much less used firewire ports. There are 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 ports with dual GPU support at x8/x8 although it is not clear at this stage if the board will support SLi, CrossFire or both as some x58 boards do. There are also another three PCI Express slots for expansion cards, along with two legacy PCI slots.

For the full expected specification please see the picture below, but please remember that these specifications may be tweaked before the board is put in to production by Asus: