Conclusions
Asus has a large number of P55 motherboards available…I counted at least 16. Of those, five are in the same product line as the P7P55D-E Pro, with this board square in the middle. $140 separates the bottom end and the top end, with the P7P55D-E Pro running $90 less than the top end board. Though there are a few differences between the two boards, mainly an extra LAN port, two extra I/O USB 2.0 ports, a nicer SB cooler, and some onboard switches, this board is a full featured board and most would find the differences negligible.
Running USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s without compensation, these are the P55 boards for the future. LGA 1156 isn’t going anywhere for a while, and these boards prepare you for the next generation of data transfer.
The P7P55D-E Pro performed well, had rock solid stability, and no issues. The BIOS was laid out very well, and has an excellent overclocking menu. Though the bundle should have been pretty plain, Asus threw in an SLI bridge and an expansion bracket with USB 2.0 and eSATA.
I found nothing not to like about this board.
The Asus P7P55D-E Pro runs $189 at my favorite online retailer. As I mentioned, this is $90 less than the P7P55D-E Premium…which is a fancy board, but 90 bucks is 90 bucks. If you can live without the extras, the P7P55D-E Pro is probably the next generation P55 board for you. ThinkComputers gives the Asus P7P55D-E Pro Intel P55 Motherboard a 10 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– A lot of board for the money
– Ready for the future with USB 3 and SATA 6Gb/s without compensation
– BIOS is very overclocker friendly
– Excellent overclocker
Cons:
– None
Great review, but you forgot one important thing. You didn't mention anything about the bridge (PLX) chip and how it doesn’t provide extra DMI bus bandwidth, which can “potentially” bottleneck anything running off the P55 chipset, ie; anything running of X1's, your OS drive, etc.
Gigabyte's USB 3.0/Sata III solution is really the only viable one, as every other USB 3.0/Sata III mobo maker uses the PLX chip.
Great review, i have same mobo, with I7 in Windows 2003 server 32 bits, i experiment a poor perfomance of this system, what can cause this?, i have a raid 0 with 2 sata of 1 Tera, and 8 Gb RAM. I have windows 2003 r2 32 bits for exchange server 2003 do not support 64 bits 🙁
Note that the P7P55D-E (non-pro) and lower boards in this family do NOT have the PLX chip solution for USB 3 and SATA 3. For those boards, USB 3 and SATA 3 share PCIE bandwidth.