The BIOS
The Asus P7P55D-E Pro, as pretty much all other Asus motherboards, uses the American Megatrends BIOS. It is a tabbed BIOS for easy navigation. The BIOS opens to the Main menu, which shows date/time, the drives found, and has a couple of submenus.
The System Information submenu shows the BIOS version and build date, the CPU model and speed, and found system memory amount.
The Ai Tweaker menu is where all overclocking will take place. I have been reviewing Asus motherboards for just over four years. The Ai Tweaker menu of the P7P55D-E Pro takes the better ideas I’ve seen over those four years and uses them. The menu is laid out well. At the top of the page are two displays, Target CPU Frequency and Target DRAM Frequency. These change as you adjust the settings, showing you what your overclock freqs will be when the system starts. I love this when I have it, and really miss it when I don’t…I really hate having to use pen and paper or calculator to figure out what settings to use to get what CPU frequency.
Asus uses “CPU Level Up” presets, something I haven’t seen on an Asus board for a while, but I thought it was a pretty good concept when I used it in the past. You can also use OC Tuner auto tuning from the BIOS, where you choose a preset profile.
The only submenu found in the Ai Tweaker menu is the “DRAM Timing Control”, where it should be, keeping the menu shorter. Overall, the menu is simple, to the point, has all the tweaks you need and few that you don’t.
The Advanced menu has a series of submenus where most non-overclocking settings are performed.
The CPU Configuration submenu has the CPU specs and all non-overclocking CPU settings. Here you enable/disable TurboBoost, SpeedStep, C-State, and the other things you should disable when overclocking or benchmarking.
The Power menu mainly contains the Hardware Monitor submenu, where temps, voltages, and the motherboard fan controls are found.
The Boot menu has submenus for Boot Device Priority and Boot Settings Configuration. The latter is where you enable/disable the BIOS splash screen.
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.