Introduction

ASUS P7P55D Deluxe Lynnfield Motherboard preview
Over the past weeks we already brought you several previews on P55 (Core i5) motherboards from partners like MSI and Gigabyte. Today we'll take a peek at ASUS's finest offering -- a P55 motherboard tagged P7P55D Deluxe. And one thing is going to be a fact, this will be such a nice motherboards series.

So as you guys know Intel is slowly but steadily preparing to release the new mainstream Core i5/i7 series processors. The new processors are quite different from the original Core i7 Nehalem socket LGA 1366 processor, it's based on what Intel calls their Lynnfield architecture and as such the new processors will (unfortunately) come with a new socket design; Socket LGA 1156.

The new upcoming processors will of course over time slowly replace the Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo series (actually these will be renamed to Core i3) of processors in the long run.. From what we can tell there should be three models Lynnfield processor on socket LGA 1156 released at launch, all are quad-core processors and based on the Lynnfield architecture, fabricated on a 45nm node.

Some key features of the Lynnfield architecture:

• Four x86 processing cores with support for HyperThreading technology
• Dual-channel DDR3 memory controller specified to run DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 modules
• 8 MB of L3 cache, and support for TurboBoost technology.
• The three processors propably will have clock frequencies of 2.66 GHz, 2.80 GHz, and 2.93 GHz and priced respectively $196, $284, and $562 USD.

To facilitate the new Lynnfield architecture processors Intel has been working on the P55 chipset, this chipset will replace P45.

So with a new processor series based on a new package, you need a new chipset for the motherboard. That is P55 -- it  supports both Lynnfield 45nm Nehalem family based quad-cores and IGP dual-core Nehalem codenamed based Clarkdale (32nm with native GPU) processors. Due to the fact that Lynnfield processors feature an integrated memory controller, like current Core i7 processors, and that they're outfitted with 16 lanes of embedded PCI Express connectivity, there's no need to pair the processors with a second chip (Southbridge). Instead, the processor will connect only to the P55 chip.

The motherboard we'll preview today is the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe  ... and it promises to be a red rose of a motherboard based on that p55 chipset. Next page please.