Overclocking
In the past I’ve used Asus’ TurboV EVO for overclocking, and it works well. But I’m an “old school” overclocker, and I get my real overclocking satisfaction in the BIOS. After some experimentation, I settled on an overclock of 4.324gHz, which is my highest overclock for this CPU to date.
Testing – Benchmarks
To check out the performance and stability of the P7P55D-E Pro, I ran a series of benchmarks. I ran the benchmarks at stock clock, and at my overclock.
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.