ASUS P7P55D EVO - Second Look

We asked for your comments in our original preview of the ASUS P7P55D EVO and did we ever receive them. We appreciate all of the comments and emails as does ASUS. Unfortunately, this board is entering mass production shortly and there was not time to incorporate some very good ideas (which we expect to see in future designs). However, ASUS did make a couple of aesthetic changes and we now have images of what is the final board design.

At this time, the only item still open is the inclusion of the Marvell 6Gb/s SATA chipset. Rumors abound that both the chipset and drivers have enough problems that manufacturers might have to pull this feature until the second generation boards hit the market. In the meantime, we present the production level ready P7P55D EVO. Regardless of the looks (which we like even more in person), this board performs great as we will see shortly.

7/14 Update - After discussing the Marvell problems with various manufacturers, it is confirmed that everyone will be pulling the Marvell 88SE9123 6Gb/s SATA chipset off their motherboards. This means the white and dark blue SATA ports on the left edge of the board will be missing on the retail version of this board. Also, we have confirmation from Marvell that the 88SE9123 will undergo a a major revision to address PATA compatibility problems (the chipset offers PATA and 6Gb/s SATA functionality). However, we still understand from several sources that 6Gb/s SATA performance was not completely up to speed. In fact, we never could get it working correctly during internal testing while PATA has worked perfectly. Based on this, we tend to believe the motherboard manufacturers and our own test results instead of a press release.