 Okay so today we're gonna be unboxing and having a quick look at the ASUS P7P55DE Deluxe. I mean, not motherboard names. It's like yes these all mean something but man are they ever like confusing when you're trying to shop and you don't actually know a lot about computers. Okay so this is part of their new extreme design platform number one performance reliability and safety. I'm not quite sure exactly what that means but anyway it's Windows 7 ready, physics ready, whatever that means. It's LGA 1156, it's P55 so you're gonna see the usual P55 features except that this is one of their new updated boards and it includes USB 3.0, SATA 6 gigabit per second as well as a 24 hybrid phase design which according to this means that it has 16 plus 3 phases and T-probe which I believe is some kind of like a dynamic adjuster of that detects and balances power phase loads and temperatures real time with optimal power phase functions components run cooler and extends system lifespan. Very cool. Okay so also on this board let's start at the top you have high you have the ExpressGate hybrid OS whatever you have system level energy efficiency so that controls everything about your system to try and get better power savings or something. You have an onboard switch which is a fairly common feature at this point you have the Q design for DIY quickly and easily. Okay you've got quad GPU SLI and quad GPU crossfire X support that's pretty cool. Auto tuning so they've got a software overclocking utility and they have Memo-K which allows you to take even memory that has sort of non standardized settings it allows you to at least get the board to boot with that memory in so that you can adjust all of the settings and get it to run properly at the rated speed. So let's get this box open and have a look at what we have for accessories. Okay the first thing I like about this board is that it has black SATA cables I am so sick of seeing like yellow and red SATA cables. Show me a system with a color scheme that yellow looks good in I challenge you to do that. Okay so you got three right angle and three straight SATA cables then you've got an SLI bridge okay you've got the Q connectors part of their Q design and those allow you to plug in the front panel connectors fairly easily. I love this this is awesome I talked about this on one of the recent ASUS boards I had a look at instead of including two USB and one Firewire port I'm now seeing combo backplates that are two USB and an eSATA port way more useful I mean who uses Firewire anyway. Okay then we've got what is this? Turbo key bus speed oh okay so this is their little overclocking remote control that looks to plug into must be USB because it's color-coded red white green black black like USB but it's a converted USB port on the board somewhere. Okay then you've got an IDE cable then you've got an IO shield which isn't color-coded but they have done one special call out you can see these two USB ports are highlighted white those are the USB 3.0 ports then we've got the piece of the user guide as well as the driver disk and ASUS case badge okay don't don't use this driver disk download the latest ones as I usually say now let's get the board itself out of here now I realized that the p55 boards launched not all that long ago but we're seeing so many updated product designs just because of the launch of SATA 3 and USB 3.0 so those that's going to become at the focus of my unboxing but let's do a quick overview of the overall design of this board okay so we have two PCI Express 16x lot so those are going to be for your crossfire or SLI they are functional in 8x 8x mode if you are using crossfire SLI like all p55 boards because the PCI Express lanes are actually powered by the CPU and not by the chipset okay down at the bottom here we've got our onboard power and reset switches and oh there's a PLX chip for some reason although I couldn't tell you what that is for oh I wish I knew why that was there because normally a PLX chip is like a PCI Express bridge chip and it's usually there to like split PCI Express lanes or something no no they both run at 8x okay so I wasn't wrong there alright so let's keep moving right along then we've got three USB 2.0 headers then we have okay so these two white ones here are the SATA 6 gigabit per second ports okay this one is SATA underscore E1 and I don't know what the relevance of that is maybe it's running off the same chipset as the other SATA back here I'm kind of guessing there and since all of the chips are covered under this kind of neat looking heatsink I can't really tell what they are then on the side of the board we've got six SATA 2 ports so these are all running off the Intel chipset we've got an IDE port you will notice the conspicuous absence of a floppy port I'm sure most people won't miss that like all p55 boards we've got support for dual channel DDR3 memory and you can see that they're using their trademark design here on the memory slots only one end of the memory slots actually has a clip so what you're supposed to do is peel these back slide the memory slot in from the top into this side and then just clip it in from the one side so it makes memory installation in theory much easier okay we've also got our memo K button over here so that is to make sure that the board can post with whatever memory you happen to be using and then up here we've got little switches to overvolt the CPU the integrated memory controller or the RAM it's kind of nice to have those hardware switches for the really hardcore guys who are using this on an open test bench anyway okay so moving right along we've got our power connector at its ideal place along the right-hand edge of the board and then we've got an 8 pin power connector up at the top sort of left of the board a lot of a lot of cases these days have a hole for it right over here so it's a little bit of a reach but overall I like this position here is our 24 phase hybrid design which apparently means 16 phases for the CPU itself and then I believe three phases for the integrated memory controller something that I really like about this board right off the bat is it has so many 4 pin fan connectors we've got a couple here and most boards usually just give you one for the CPU and no other ones but it's kind of nice to see that as soon as using their now trademark because so many of their recent boards are using it this kind of like ice castle looking MOSFET cooler design I really like that I think it looks really stylish do what am I missing here okay well here's the oh here here's the plug for that for that overclocking remote control thing so I can't imagine the practicality of that but I guess you plug it in here if you're on an open test bench and then you can kind of run it off the top of the board that way here's the CPU socket it's an LGA 1156 socket sports core i5 core i7 blah blah blah okay that oh I like this actually it's so rare you see the board manufacturers not cheap out and use like proper back plates on their MOSFET coolers because this really gives a lot more rigidity to the board I mean a PCB has a lot of flex in it so when you put these kind of mounting plates on the back it allows you to make much better contact with the MOSFET coolers on the top so you can ensure that everything gets cooled adequately so I really like to see that as well okay then let's get around to the back of the board here we've got two PS2 ports I don't think these are ever gonna go away to be honest we have a clear CMOS switch here's our two USB 3.0 ports then we have two digital audio ports we've got six USB 2.0 ports a firewire and eSATA 2 gigabit ethernet ports as well as 7.1 audio and thank you for checking out my unboxing of the p7p 55d e deluxe