Hardware First look: Asus P7P55D Evo motherboard

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2009/07/13/first-look-asus-p7p55d-evo-motherboard/1

Asus rushes us the first working sample of it's very first LGA1156 motherboard in the UK. We take a look, benchmark and overclock this first of its kind motherboard for the forthcoming Lynnfield Core i5 and i7 CPUs.

 

Did Intel say when this could happen?

That's a really neat looking board, I love the lack of a huge heatpipe assembly!

The new mounting holes for cooling is ridiculously dumb though.. Intel stands to gain nothing here, two more MM and nobody would have any problems. Pretty much every cooling company already has i7 heatsinks out, the change in form factor is just dumb.

You couldn't give us one graph or table? How does it look on the test bench?

 

i much preferred the days where everything was p4, and more ghz meant it was better

 

Meh. Hardly a 5 Ghz overclock on air like they were waving some time ago, I seriously doubt you had 3.8 Ghz stock speed cpu.

Real i7 still looks like more desirable option, unless the platform costs are significantly, like atleast 30% lower. Castrating the SLI/Crossfire by limiting the amount of PCIe-lanes was plain retarded.

 

Less PCI-E lanes isn't much of bottleneck yet, maybe DX11 cards will change that, but there's no way to know.

I'll stay single-card, just like almost everybody. P55 is more mainstream, dual x16 PCI-E isn't important to the mainstream crowd. If you need that, stick with X58.

 

To be fair, the article does say 'at least'... dependent on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, you can decide whether that means, "We got 1.21GHz overclock before it wouldn't even POST any more" or "We got it to a 100% overclock with no sweat but we promised Intel (read: we're under NDA) that we wouldn't brag about it".


If that layout remains the same, the P55 chip overheating is going to be a fairly common occurrence. No heatpipes is a good thing for watercoolers/aftermarket cooling improvements... but I can't believe that Asus haven't spotted a potential issue with cooling the P55.

 

Are these articles just being taken verbatim from CPC? I've seen this in a few articles now and its rather annoying. Its usually a reference to a story which has already been on bit-tech so its not as if you couldn't link them. And who is editing these articles such that they get through with references to a different publication?

 

I'm not going to name and shame - instead I'll blame it on being a Monday morning

Fixed now.

 

Looks neat, too bad the PCI-E controller is so gimped. I'll be sticking with 1366 if i can still get my hands on one.

 

CPC and Bit-Tech, AFAIK, same family and same writers in some instances.

As CPC website no longer seems to appear to have anything, and I do wonder why it even appears on the web seeing as it is never updated, it's no surprise some of the CPC info now shows up on Bit Tech.

 

Looks interesting and the last paragraph is mouth-watering. Any hints on when we can possibly expect a full review? Maybe with prices even?

 

Back to basics with the chipset/vreg-cooling. Liking it!

 

Yep, Intel wouldn't want news that these chips overclock well spreading into the press. They have to make sure that everyone is quiet about how good these chips are, or else people might buy them.

 

I think they don't want people to see how good they are and decide to wait for them instead of buying the more expensive i7s now.

 

I'd imagine the overheating P55 chip will be sorted out by time the boards are in mass production - the board we had sported a beta P55 chip (i.e. non-final silicon)

That all depends on Intel, but I'd be surprised if we'll be allowed to show any of the awesome performance results we've already got for a few more weeks.

 

I initially thought the same but then I remembered when they updated the Xeon's from 7520 to 5000 chipset. Same mounting holes, but the proc was about a millimeter taller or less tall or something. So if you used an old heatsink it seemed to install & looked ok, but would actually overheat pretty quickly because it didn't make proper contact.

So if with Lynfield for some reason they couldn't keep the proc at the same thickness, it actually makes sense to have different mounting holes, as annoying as it is!

 

I would certainly hope so. However, forgive me for being sceptical, but while I'd accept that the board layout/heatsink size might change... if the chip is overheating now, I doubt that it'll suddenly stop overheating just because Intel finalise the silicon.

 

BAH! DAMN YOU BIT-TECH! You make me so sad T_T
All I want to know about right now is the price and performance of Lynnfield in comparison to AM3 and what do you do? You do a P55 Mobo preview which looks sexy as hell and makes me want to know even more T_T

All I have to say is now you've made me check my RSS feed every 15 minutes for news/reviews of the Lynnfield processors which I know won't be there for weeks, the worlds a cruel place indeed

EDIT: One thing I'd like to know, does it use as much power as i7? Overclock and no Overclock? I'm not sure they'd care about you telling us that info but if you can't I'll live.

 

I seriously doubt that 5 GHz is possible on air, given the fact that even the most expensive Lynnfield is only clocked at just under 3 GHz, and that is a $500 CPU. Still, a 4 GHz overclock with hyper-threading is not to be poo-pooed, it just does raise the benchmark any higher than the i7.

I hope that a Lynnfield's total build price is significantly lower than an equivalent i7, it seems to me that given the monthly reduction in price of i7 parts, a future Lynnfield build will not actually represent any better value, than a time-adjusted i7 one.

Will Lynnfield get a die shrink to 32nm in the future, or just give way to Sandy Bridge?