Asus P7P55D Premium Motherboard

Our Test Build:

• Asus P7P55D Premium motherboard (obviously)
• Thermaltake ToughPower XT 750W Power supply
• Core i5 750 (stock cooler)
• Lite On iHES208 Blu-Ray drive
• Seagate Barracuda XT SATA III 6gb Drive that we reviewed recently.
• XFX Nvida GTS 250 graphics card
• 4GB (2x 2gb) Patriot Viper Ram ( DDR3 1333 )
• Windows 7 Enterprise.
• Antec Nine Hundred advanced gaming case (and older case but still full of cooling goodness)
• Artic Silver 5 thermal grease as per the instructions found here (arcticsilver.com)

* All tests were performed using Asus’s recommended settings for SATA III which was setting the Marvell 9123 controller to AHCI and shutting off the Intel C-STATE tech in the bios.

Taking it in a step by step process goes beyond the scope of this review but in short.

1. Install the CPU and cooler
2. Mount the board on the standoff’s in the case
3. Install drives
4. Install the power supply and wire the board
5. Install ram
6. Install graphics card
7. Verify all connectors and cables.
8. ….

At step 8 which should have been first power on I ran into a slight issue and it was directly related to the ram, it appears that the motherboard requires a “compatibility tuning” before it will allow new ram to be used. This isn’t really an issue and if you read the instruction’s you will quickly find out what is going on. After the short “compatibility tuning” I was back in business.

Final step before attempting any overclocking is to install an OS and the Asus driver/utility disk. I chose Windows 7 for the main OS which when installed had all of the drivers pre-installed, for sanity and testing sake I installed the driver disk anyway. For the most part the install process when flawlessly though it would have been nice for Asus’s disk to have a install all with the ability to un-check certain components instead of installing everything individually, this is really just a minor nitpick but this should have been standard practice by now.

Some shots from inside the case

Quick look at Express Gate:

First thing I’d like to mention before talking about that actual bios is that the P7P55D Premium comes with Asus’s unique Express Gate feature. What Express Gate is essentially is an instant on Web OS named Splashtop based off a Linux kernel and stored on a flash memory chip that allows you to use web based applications via a stripped down Firefox web browser.  The Splashtop OS was unveiled at CES 2008 and has since made its way into a number of devices produced by Asus.

Express gate aka Splashtop OS loading screen	Main selection screen, all the buttons on the right go to the same place just preload certain pages.
Web based flash games, Skype and pidgen chat client.	What appears to be a stripped down firefox.

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