An In-depth Evaluation: ASUS P7P55D Deluxe

BIOS
The BIOS on the P7P55D Deluxe follows the same lines as most other Asus BIOS do. It is pretty much an AMI [American Megatrends Inc] BIOS layout with ASUS customizations for their products. In fact the basic layout of the BIOS [Award, AMI, Pheonix and others] have not changed much in the last 10 years.

   
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For the enthusiast the place to be inside the P7P55D Deluxe BIOS is the AITweaker page. Here is where you will find all of the system level tweaks and adjustments for you to squeeze all of the performance you can out of your system.

   

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Another place you will want to stop is the Tools page. Here is where you can turn off the Express Gate function if you like as well as launch the Drive Xpert configuration utility, and the Asus O.C. Profile function.

Overclocking
Overclocking the P7P55D Deluxe was a pretty easy task. I started off by using the Auto Tuning feature. This got me to a decent 189x21 [3969 MHz]. From there I was able to puch it a little higher and still maintain stability on the board. In the end I was able to get a stable OC of 192x21 [4032 MHz] This is a little higher than the 4029MHz that has been my highest OC using the Core i7 870 but not by anything truly noteworthy.  This overclock was also completely POSTable, as we found that we could indeed push farther for short periods using the TurboV function.  In the end I was able to get all the way up to 210x20 for a 4.213GHz overclock. Unfortunately this speed failed under the stress of an eight-instance HyperPi Run so it was not used for our testing here.

4.045GHz CPU-Z Validation here
4.213GHz CPU-Z Validation here

*Overclocking is dependent on the hardware used. It will also vary from part to part even within the same product type. Our results may differ from yours and represent our best effort with a “quick” overclock. Typically we spend no more than one hour to get a stable clock speed. You may be able to get better results with more time and fine tuning of settings.

Test System and Comments
Our test system is shown below:
Intel Core i7 870 [Provided by Intel]
Asus P7P55D Deluxe [Provided by ASUS]
Kingston HyperX KHX12800D3T1K3/6GX 4GB [Provided by Kingston]
GigaByte GV-R489UD-1GD Radeon HD4890 1GB [Provided by GIGABYTE]
Cooler Master Hyper 212 [with an extra fan] [Provided by CoolerMaster]
Kingston 128GB SSD Now V+ [2x in RAID 0], Kingston 80GB SSD Now M [Provided by Kingston], 500GB Seagate 7200.11 SATA II HDD [Provided by Seagate]
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Comments
Normally in the comment section we cover anything out of the ordinary that might affect your use and or setup of the product we are reviewing. In the case of the P7P55D Deluxe we did not run into anything major at all. We did have the incident with getting our knuckles cut up on the heatsinks when connecting the 12-V Aux Power and the TurboV remote but that was not that big of a deal really. As was the issue with removing the Video Card used [we had to use a plastic stick]. We had not problems with the BIOS, driver installation or installing components. In all the P7P55D was an easy board to get setup and running.