Asus's Core i5 motherboard

Posted on 3 Aug 2009 at 16:52

These are the first pics of Asus's P7P55D Deluxe motherboard, one of the first to support Intel's new range of processors. The P55 chipset has an LGA1156 socket, which will support the new Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Core i5 is the long-awaited replacement for the affordable and popular Core 2 range, and will be available later this year.

The P55 chipset does away with the triple-channel memory configuration seen on the current Core i7 X58 boards, instead offering four memory slots in dual-channel mode. However, it still uses DDR3 memory, which is slightly more expensive than DDR2. There's support for up to 16GB of memory, with speeds of up to 1600MHz.

The P7P55D's only requires the usual 24-pin and 4-pin power connectors, so there shouldn't be any need to update your power supply when upgrading. It's an ATX board too, and so will fit the vast majority of existing cases. The two PCI-Express x16 slots on the board support both SLI and CrossFire, so serious gamers will be able to choose between ATI and Nvidia cards.

We love its two-tone blue colour scheme and matching heat sink. There's everything here you'd expect from a Deluxe board from Asus. There are two PCI-Express x1 and two PCI slots for adding extra cards. The six SATA ports on the edge of the board benefit from a RAID controller. Plus there are plenty of ports on the rear of the board, including dual Gigabit Ethernet, coaxial and optical S/PDIFs and eight USB ports.

We can't wait to get final production chips from Intel so we can start benchmarking them. We'll bring you full coverage of P55 boards and Core i5 as soon as we can.

Author: Seth Barton

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