okay so today we're going to be unboxing and having a quick look at the ASUS p7p
55d e Deluxe I mean motherboard names
it's like yes these all mean something but man are they ever like confusing
when you're trying to shop and you don't actually know a lot about computers okay
so this is part of their new Extreme Design platform number one performance
reliability and safety I'm not quite sure exactly what that means but anyway
it's Windows 7 ready physics ready whatever that means it's LGA 1156 it's
p55 so you're going to see the usual p-55 features except that this is one of
their new updated boards and it includes USB 3.0 SATA 6 gbit per second as well
as a 24 hybrid phase design which according to this means that it
has 16 plus three phases and T probe
which I believe is some kind of like a dynamic adjuster of detects and balances
power phase loads and temperatures Real Time with optimal power power phase
functions components run cooler and extend system lifespan very cool okay so
also on this board let's start at the top you have you have the express gate
hybrid OS whatever you have system level Energy Efficiency so that um controls
everything about your system to try and get better power savings or something
you have an onboard switch um which is a fairly common feature at this point you
have the Q design for DIY quickly and easily okay you've got quad GPU SLI and
quad GPU Crossfire X support that's pretty cool Auto so they've got a
software overclocking utility and they have memo K which allows you to take
even memory that has sort of non-standardized um non-standardized
settings it allows you to at least get the board to boot with that memory in so
that you can adjust all of the settings and get it to run properly at the rated
speed so let's get this box open and have a look at what we have for
accessories okay the first thing I like about this board is that it has black
SATA cables I am so sick of seeing like yellow and red SATA cables show me a
system with a color scheme that yellow looks good in I challenge you to do that
okay so you got three right angle and three straight SATA cables then you've
got an SLI Bridge okay you've got the Q connectors part of their Q design and
those allow you to plug in the front panel connectors fairly easily I love
this this is awesome I talked about this on one of the recent assus boards I had
a look at instead of including two USB and one fire wire Port I'm now seeing
combo back plates that are 2 USB and an ESAT Port way more useful I mean who
uses fire wire anyway okay then we've got what is
this turbo key bus speed oh okay so this is their little overclocking remote
control that looks to plug into uh must be USB because it's colorcoded red white
green black black like USB but it's a converted USB port on the board
somewhere okay then you've got an IDE cable then you've got an IO Shield which
isn't colorcoded but they have done one special call out you can see these two
USB ports are highlighted white those are the USB 3.0 ports then we've got the
piece the user guide as well as the driver disc and a case badge okay don't
don't use this driver disc download the latest ones as I usually say now let's
get the board itself out of here now I
realized that the uh p-55 boards launched not all that long ago but we're
seeing so many updated product designs just because of the launch of SATA 3 and
USB 3.0 so that's going to be kind of the focus of my unboxing but let's do a
quick overview of the overall design of this board okay so we have two PCI
Express 60x slot so those are going to be for your Crossfire or SLI they are
functional in adex adex mode if you are using Crossfire SLI like all p55 boards
because the PCI Express Lanes are actually powered by the CPU and not by
the chipset okay down at the bottom here we've got our onboard power and reset
switches and oh there's a plx chip for some reason although I couldn't tell you
what that is for w wish I knew why that
was there cuz normally a plx chip is like a PCI Express Bridge chip and it's
usually there to like split PCI Express Lanes or something no no they both run
at adex okay so I wasn't wrong there all right so let's keep moving right along
then we've got three USB 2.0 headers
then we have okay so these two white
ones here are the SATA 6 gabit per
second ports okay this one is satore E1
and I don't know what the relevance of that that is maybe it's running off the
same chipset as the other eSATA back here I'm kind of guessing there and
since all of the chips are covered under this kind of neat looking um heat sink I
can't really tell what they are then on the side of the board we've got six SATA
2 ports so these are all running off the Intel chipset we've got an IDE port you
will notice the conspicuous absence of a floppy Port I'm sure most people won't
miss that like all p-55 boards we've got support for dual Channel DDR3 memory and
you can see that they're using their um trademark design here on the memory
slots only one end of the memory slots actually has a clip so what you're
supposed to do is peel these back slide the memory slot in from the top into
this side and then just clip it in from the one side so it makes memory
installation in theory much easier okay we've also got our memo K button over
here so that is to make sure that the board can post with whatever memory you
happen to be using and then up here we've got little uh switches to overvolt
the CPU the integrated memory controller or the RAM it's kind of nice to have
those hardware switches for the really hardcore guys who are using this on an
open test bench anyway okay so moving right along we've got our power
connector at its ideal place along the right hand edge of the board and then
we've got an eight pin power connector up at the top sort of left of the board
a lot of a lot of cases these days have a hole for it right over here so it's a
little bit of a reach but overall I like this position uh here is our 2 24 phase
hybrid design which apparently means 16 phases for the CPU itself and then I
believe three phases for for the integrated memory controller something
that I really like about this board right off the bat is it has so many four
pin fan connectors we've got a couple here and most boards usually just give
you one for the CPU and no other ones but it's kind of nice to see that ASUS
is using their now trademark because so many of their recent boards are using it
this kind of like ice castle looking Moss fet cooler design I really like
that I think it looks really stylish um
what am I missing here okay well here's the oh here here's the plug for that um
for that overclocking remote control thing so I can't imagine the
practicality of that but I guess you plug it in here if you're on an open test bench and then you can kind of run
it off the top of the board that way uh here's the CPU socket it's an LGA 1156
socket supports Core i5 core i7 blah blah blah okay thaty oh I like this
actually it's so rare you see the board manufacturers not cheap out and uh use
like proper back plates on their mosfet coolers because this really gives a lot
more rigidity to the board I mean a PCB has a lot of flex in it so when you put
these kind of mounting plates on the back it allows you to make much better
contact with the mosfet coolers on the top so you can ensure that everything
gets cooled adequately so I really like to see that as well okay then let's get
around to the back of the board here we've got two PS2 ports I don't think these are ever going to go away to be
honest we have a clear seimo switch here's our two USB 3.0 ports then we
have two digital audio ports we've got six USB 2.0 ports a fire wire an eat 2
gigabit Ethernet ports as well as 7.1 audio and thank you for checking out my
unboxing of the p7p 55d deluxe