Asus has officially announced its P55 based P7P55D-E Premium motherboard, the first one from Asus that will feature USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0Gbps.

In order to deal with the bottleneck, Asus has included a PLX bridge chip that will give both the USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0Gbps controllers double the bandwidth compared to the plain P55 approach, which means that these two will have higher read and write speeds.

The P7P55D-E has support for Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 processors designed for the LGA 1156 socket, has four DDR3-2200 slots, two PCI-Express x16 slots, six older SATA 3.0Gbps and two SATA 6.0Gbps ports, Gigabit LAN, one eSATA port, 7.1-channel integrated audio and of course two USB 3.0 ports.

For those motherboards that aren't equipped with a PLX chip and onboard SATA 6.0Gbps and USB 3.0 ports, Asus has announced U3S6 expansion card that hooks up to a PCIe x4 slot and features two USB 3.0 and two SATA 6.0Gbps ports. This one is compatible with Maximus III Formula, P7P55D and P7P55D Deluxe/EVO/PRO/LE/LX motherboards as well as probably all other motherboards that can accommodate it.

The motherboard should be available before Christmas, so we're guessing that it should launch by the end of November or early December in the worst case scenario. Unfortunately, the prices for the new motherboard and the U3S6 expansion card weren't announced.




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