Less visually exciting, but with a broader appeal than its R.O.G. product line, is Asus’ Premium series, and the P7P55D-E Premium is no exception. Asus packs it with over twice the number of power regulator phases and several more connectors compared to its gaming motherboard, adding new features such as SATA 6.0 Gb/s and the USB 3.0 controller previously reviewed here.
Only one of the P7P55D-E Premium’s network interfaces is limited to PCI bandwidth, since the primary controller is a PCIe part. The chipset’s remaining seven PCIe lanes go to the motherboard’s two x1 slots, a JMB368 Ultra ATA controller, and the PLX PCIe bridge. The bridge is required to convert four 2.5 GT/s lanes to two 5 Gb/s links used by the USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s controllers.
As the first Premium series motherboard we’ve recently tested, the P7P55D-E Premium is also the first in recent months to include Asus’ Express Gate flash drive, as less expensive models now rely on a hard drive to store the included Splashtop OS. Boot times of as little as five seconds can quickly launch important applications such as a Web browser or Skype client.
The Express Gate flash drive consumes two USB ports, limiting the P7P55D-E Premium to two twin-port headers. Two rows of empty solder points remain where the third header is placed on the less-expensive P7P55D-E Deluxe.
With all eight of the P55’s PCIe lanes dedicated to devices and x1 slots, Asus had no room to add the x4 slot found on many competing products. The P7P55D-E Premium still includes two x16-length slots and a set of lane switches that allow these to share the processor’s 16 lanes in x8/x8 mode, which happens whenever the second slot is occupied.
Like most of Asus’ current products, a MemOK button next to the 24-pin power connector eases the use of improperly-programmed memory, slowing speed and/or timings to more easily allow the system to enter BIOS where such modules can be configured manually.
Our two major layout complaints focus on the P7P55D-E Premium’s bottom-rear corner, where both the front-panel audio and IEEE-1394 breakout connections are found. Most high-end cases now have these ports near the top front corner, making cable installation extremely difficult, if not impossible. Remaining cable headers are so conveniently placed that only these two problems stand out, although there is a surprising scarcity of fan connectors given the motherboard’s high-end market.
Asus mixes up the SATA connectors, placing two of the chipset’s six ports along the P7P55D-E Premium’s bottom edge. Two SATA 6.0 Gb/s connections above the other four forward-facing ports are intended for internal drive use, and the mixed placement allows easier access to the chipset’s ports for an included single-port eSATA breakout plate. No eSATA is available through the I/O panel.

Overclockers won’t need access to a notebook computer to tune the P7P55D-E Premium externally, as Asus includes its TurboV Remote with this model. The big differences are more convenience and fewer features. It's up to the enthusiast to decide which is the more rewarding path to tuning his or her machine.
BIOS
Asus' Ai Tweaker menu contains both manual and automatic overclock settings, including CPU Level Up to approximate a faster processor’s settings and OC Tuner to automatically increase and stability test BCLK and RAM settings.
Asus adds Clock Skew and reference voltage controls to its enthusiast-level motherboards, and Load-Line Calibration reduces Intel’s designed-in core voltage fluctuation to improve overclocking stability.
The P7P55D-E Premium has a full list of DRAM timing controls to assist even the most aggressive performance seekers. The board also supports flashing from non-bootable media via its EZ Flash 2 interface.
Up to eight custom BIOS configurations can be saved as user profiles or exported to a drive.
Accessories

A relatively basic installation kit includes four SATA 3.0 Gb/s and two SATA 6.0 Gb/s cables, an Ultra ATA cable, and an SLI bridge. Included but not shown is a breakout plate featuring two USB 2.0 ports and a single eSATA port.
- Nothing But The Best?
- On-Board Features Comparison
- Asus Maximus III Formula
- Asus P7P55D-E Premium
- EVGA P55 Classified 200
- MSI Big Bang Trinergy
- Test Settings
- Benchmark Results: Crysis And Far Cry 2
- Benchmark Results: Clear Sky And World In Conflict
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Overclocking
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Conclusion








1156 FTW !!!!!
- No six core CPU's, EVER.
- Requires a glued on chip for more then 16 lanes.
- Motherboards overpriced compared to socket AM3.
When you buy a socket 1156 system that is all the performance you're going go get out of it. The top-end CPU's won't come down in price by much and Intel made it clear it's a mainstream platform. My socket AM3 has playable FPS, the motherboard is high end and under $200, and I'll be able to continue upgrading in the future. That is what matters to me. The Intel fan boy articles are getting so old.
They don't.
It might surprise you that new motherboard series articles follow new chipsets. So AMD fanboy, where's the new AMD chipset?
1. Do you mean on these boards or in general?
2. If it is for these boards, did you install the drivers/software from each manufaturer or used the default Windows drivers?
Thanks for the reply
None of the manufacturers list support for DDL or DTS Connect any longer. Those technologies were most likely licensed in the past and neglected due to lack of demand and cost, because typical buyers don't know what they are and won't pay extra for them.
It may well be Intel's monopolize actions that got AMD to this point when AMD had the top processors, but the truth is AMD products suck right now.
There are P55 mobos under $160 that you can easily find, which will still beat AM3 systems quite handily. For example, get a DFI Lanparty P55-T36.
First of all, most reviewers are begging AMD to pull a rabbit out of the hat just to get the competition moving again. Second, AMD does give you more chipset for your money.
Don't rule out P55 as a viable upgrade path, While the vast majority of people will pass on Gulftown due to price, the 32nm Sandybridge will support 1156. Give me low-thermal, high effeciency, super-overclockability in an affordable quadcore package, I'd take that over a hexacore all day long.
But 1156 has to support bottleneck free pci-e. I'm already 98pct sure the NF200 can't pull it off, but was really hoping we'd have a definitive answer.
I agree with the others who wonder why anyone would want this lobotomized platform instead of the x58. There are serious compromises with this. It's great for the Clarksdale, which is a low-end product with a lot of compromises made so it's mainstream, but when you start to go high-end, it just makes no sense at all.
First of all, despite the opening page's assertion that these overclock better than Bloomfields - they don't. They overclock worse, and generally need significantly higher voltages to hit the same clock speeds. They also have to multiplex the already more restricted memory bus of the processor when using video cards that access main memory (since PCI-E is on the processor, it's got to use processor pins to reach memory). On top of this, to get full performance from modern technologies like USB 3.0, or SATA 6.0 GB, you have to do weird things with the PCI-E lanes, which increase latency and/or steal lanes from the video card so it can't use all 16.
This platform is a kludge. It's a series of compromises made to keep costs and power down. It's fine for a mainstream platform, but when we're told it's good for high-end too, it's got a lot of us scratching our heads wondering why we're being told this. It just makes no sense and we're not buying it. Intel can put all the lipstick they want on this pig, but it's still not a Hippo.
Ok this attitude is the EXACT opposite conclusion show here
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16729/40/1/4/
Let's keep it simple: the Socket 1366 platform is obsolete. The turbo modes are very limiting and the three channel memory setup gives only a slight advantage. Of course, Socket 1366 CPUs don't come cheap either. The quite new i5 CPU is much easier to overclock and it's not that hard to achieve higher memory speeds.
Considering system cost, then the P55 platform is the clear winner. We have already proven that Hyperthreading/SMT is more or less a marketing gimmick. It works only with very few applications and in highly optimized applications such as x264 or games, it decreases performance. That's also the reason why we did not consider to use the i7-800 CPU series for this review.
Looking for the best performance money can buy, we recommend the i5-750 CPU. If you need SLI or Crossfire, shop for boards with an additional NF200 chip to get the most out of your two graphics cards, otherwise the P55 does just fine.
System costs are less, no northbridge, never going to have to worry about cooling that. less to troubleshoot.
But I don't think either is a "kludge" whatever that is. Theres a right choice for everyone. It seems if a personal choice is threatened in a tech article people lose it !
You sound like AMD fanboy to me..
And what a bs about upgrading lol, AMD or Intel they all will make you to upgrade, as for pricing, 965 cost same as i5 750, so do the math mate.
Both Intel and AMD here 4 profit, you just need to find a better deal.
Do you guys have anyone technical writing your articles? Is this a cheap way of generating traffic for your site ?
P55 is a series of compromises. The NF200 chip adds cost, power use, and latency, and does not have the same performance of the x58. How could you not know that? If you're going to use this chip, why bother with the P55?
Also, several P55 processors do support hyperthreading. It's not the issue here. However, it clearly does show advantages in some applications, and the cost is negligible in terms of hardware. It does, of course, work better on the x58, since you'll put more strain on the memory bandwidth, which is considerably better.
The memory bandwidth does help in a lot of applications, and some it doesn't. It will matter more the more you are doing, since if you have four active processors, running eight threads, sharing one memory bus, you're going to depend on that bus a lot than when you're barely using it. Again, hyperthreading will make it more important, since you're also going to be missing the caches more often. Throw in a video card that needs memory accesses (which have to go through the processor on the P55), and you can have some problems with the more limited bandwidth of the P55.
On top of this, for reasons mentioned above, you probably will not see more than four cores on the P55 since the platform is so compromised. The x58 can work with more, without the same performance fall off.
No one with any technical knowledge would say the x58 is obsolete. It's not even opinion at that point. It's just a terrible analysis. If you want to say it's unnecessary for most people, we could argue that. But obsolete? It does things the P55 can't do, and does them better. It's a very, very poor choice of words.