The guys from Xfastest managed to score a picture and some details on yet another upcoming Asus P55 based motherboard, the P7P55D Premium. This one represents the high-end segment of Asus' LGA-1156 line, and will include SATA III controller.

What comes as a surprise is the 32+3 phase design, or to be precise 8x4 configuration for the CPU for which is most likely overkill. The rest of the specs include two PCI-Express x16 slots, two PCI-Express x1 and two plain PCI slots. It comes with two Gigabit LAN controllers, 8-channel audio, bunch of USB ports, six SATA II and two additional SATA III ports.

The big chip on the left is supposedly used in order to overcome the PCIe x1 Gen1 250MB/s bottleneck that gives Marvell's 9123 chip some problems. On the other hand the chipset should support PCIe x1 2.0 and we see no reason in merging the two PCIe 1.1 x1 lanes to one PCIe 2.0 x1 lane in order to get Marvell to work. The other thing that bothers us is the fact that there is no hard drive that can do 600MB/s, at least not any time soon.

In any case this is how Asus' P55 high-end offer looks. You can check out more at XFastest.com.


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