by Doors4ever
10/15/2009 | 04:45 PM
I am going to devote the next few months to mainboards on Intel P55 Express chipset. At this point we are already familiar with Asus P7P55D Deluxe and Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6. It seems quite logical to have a solution from Micro-Star reviewed at this time, however, unfortunately, our tests of MSI P55-GD65 mainboard got prematurely terminated. Right after we reflashed the latest BIOS using the built-in M-Flash tool the board refused to boot. Luckily, we still have a lot of solutions lined up so today we are going to focus on a board from ASRock.
There are four mainboard models in ASRock’s lineup of solutions on Intel P55 Express chipset. If you click the small picture below, you will see a comparative specification table with all of them in it.
ASRock P55M Pro is the junior model in the lineup. It is designed in MicroATX form-factor, but nevertheless, it allows putting together a high-performance system. For example, we see two graphics cards slots. However, it is important to keep in mind that the lower slot works at lower PCI Express 2.0 speed of only x4 and the board officially supports only ATI CrossFireX and Quad CrossFireX, but there is no mention of Nvidia SLI anywhere.
ASRock P55 Pro mainboard boasts a slightly richer list of features. It has more expansion slots, six Serial ATA ports instead of four, has a POST code indicator, Power On, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons, simple heatsinks over the processor voltage regulator components. By the way, the processor voltage regulator has eight phases instead of four.
The first full-size and fully-functional ASRock mainboard on P55 Express is called P55 Extreme. We see three graphics card slots here for the first time. The first slot works at full PCI Express 2.0 x16 speed. If you connect a second graphics card, the first and second slots will start working at only half the speed of x8. There is also the third slot that works as PCI Express 2.0 x4. The board supports ATI CrossFireX, 3-Way CrossFireX and Quad CrossFireX, as well as NVIDIA SLI and Quad SLI.
The top solution in this lineup is called ASRock P55 Deluxe and this mainboard is going to be the main hero of our today’s review.
ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard is shipped in a relatively small vertical box with a convenient plastic carry handle. The cardboard package is decorated with the logos of all supports functions and technologies. There is a more detailed description of all these technologies on the back of the box alongside with the mainboard photo and brief list of technical specs in several different languages.
Besides the mainboard, the box also contains the following accessories:
As you can see, there is nothing extraordinary among the accessories bundled with ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard except the SATA3 or SATA-600 expansion card. This is a small card with PCI Express x1 interface built around Marvell 88SE9123-NAA2 controller that provides two internal SATA3 ports and one external eSATA port.
Unlike Gigabyte that have made their top GA-P55-UD6 mainboard extremely complex without real good reason for it and mostly in order to impress the potential customer, ASRock decided not to take the same deliberately erroneous direction. ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard looks exactly what an Intel P55 Express based mainboard is supposed to look like. Of course, there are a few excessive extras, but we can forgive the top of the line flagship product for that.
We see 16 phases of the processor voltage regulator circuitry at the top of the PCB. The number of active phases may vary automatically depending on the current load level. There are two large aluminum heatsinks connected with a heatpipe cooling the voltage regulator components. Four DDR3 DIMM slots can hold the same 16 GB of RAM as the six DIMM slots of Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6. The power supply connectors are all very conveniently located. The Power On and Reset buttons are highlighted during work.
I can’t help mentioning that ASRock P55 Deluxe allows using the coolers designed for LGA775 platforms. This feature is called C.C.O. (Combo Cooler Option). We know a few LGA1366 mainboards that features two sets of cooler retention holes, but it is much more complicated to implement this on an LGA1156 mainboard. Even on an LGA1366 the gap between the two different retention holes is so small that they nearly overlap.
How could they ensure that the board will be compatible with the cooling solutions of both types is the distance between the LGA1156 retention holes and LGA775 retention holes is half the size of the distance between LGA775 and LGA1366? It seems totally impossible to ensure this combination compatibility, as the retention holes for LGA775 and LGA1156 coolers should inevitably overlap. However, ASRock engineers introduced a truly unique solution to this problem by moving the LGA775 retention holes a little bit to the right, nearly turning them clockwise by a few degrees.
Of course, not all LGA775 coolers will be compatible with ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard, but we have to give ASRock engineers due credit for inventiveness.
The first blue graphics card slot out of the three available on this board works at full PCI Express 2.0 x16 speed. When you install a second graphics card, the connectors’ bandwidth drops to PCI Express 2.0 x8, while the third connector works only as PCI Express 2.0 x4. Intel P55 Express chip is covered with a pretty big but low-profile heatsink and provides support for six SATA ports. They used an additional JMicron JMB363 controller to implement PATA interface and Powered eSATA on the back panel. The board is also equipped with a POST codes indicator.
ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard has the following ports and connectors on the back:
The components layout will give you a better idea of the ASRock P55 Deluxe PCB design and its advantages:
As usual, we would like to wind up our discussion of the mainboard design and functionality with the detailed list of its technical specifications:
At this point we can only praise ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard, as there is nothing to complain about. It has very convenient layout, fully-fledged and contemporary set of technical features. We didn’t discover any serious drawbacks or design issues. The use of plastic push-pin retention for the cooling heatsinks is totally acceptable as the components do not heat too much at all, and not the best location of the FDD connector is something we don’t even mention these days anymore. Therefore, ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard and its developers receive our first high score.
Now let’s move on to the BIOS Setup of ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard. If you have never worked with an ASRock mainboard before, you may find the BIOS looking a little unusual. And even if you very well familiar with our latest ASRock X58 Extreme review, you will still notice a bunch of differences and changes. These will be the changes for both: better as well as on the contrary. However, the first startup screen that you see on entering the BIOS remained unchanged. Here we set the current date and time and all other parameters tell us the basic system info: BIOS version, CPU and memory specifications.
The second section sued to be “Smart”. Now it is gone and the parameters that belonged there have been distributed over the remaining BIOS sections. I have to say that it is a pity really. It was a disputable solution but I considered it a great idea to single out all options related to the choice of preset operational modes into the second BIOS screen. However, now we see “OC Tweaker” section instead, which contains a lot of parameters essential for proper system configuring, although still not all of them. This is definitely a smart solution: before we used to look for these particular settings deep down in the “Advanced” section.
The first couple of parameters allow overclocking the processor or memory to the preset fixed values. The algorithms are not the best ones: the base clock and voltages will increase, the processor clock multiplier will decrease. This approach may be of interest mostly to commencing overclockers, but we have to keep in mind that automatic overclocking modes like that on all mainboards are a sort of a compromise between simplicity and efficiency that is why they are not perfect. “Intelligent Energy Saver” parameter allows enabling ASRock’s brand name power-saving technologies, but doesn’t allow managing the possible modes. There is a new parameter called “Good Night LED”. If you enable it and the system goes into sleep mode, it promises to turn off not only all onboard LEDs but also the keyboards ones.
“Overclock Mode” parameter by default is set to Auto, but it can be changed to Manual and in this case we will get full access to frequency adjustment options. We can select “I.O.T.” (Intelligent Overclocking Technology) – ASRock’s brand name implementation of automatic overclocking technology. When the processor load rises, the base and PCI Express bus frequencies will increase by the set number in the interval from 0 to 10%. Moreover, “Overclock Mode” parameter may also be set to Optimized, but there is no mention of this mode anywhere in the manual that comes with the board. It is a little strange to see that “Boost Failure Guard” parameter is enabled by default. It would be logical to enable it only when some non-standard or overclocking-related modes are selected.
The next group of parameters allows changing the processor clock frequency multiplier, QPI and memory bus frequencies. The settings related to memory timings have all be moves to a separate page.
Another group of parameters within “OC Tweaker” section deals with the voltages. There is an option protecting against processor voltage drop under heavy load. All high values are highlighted with a warning red color. Overclocking fans should be pleased with the ability to set processor Vcore at a fixed value or just add a certain value to the nominal setting if the “CPU Voltage” parameter has been switched to “Override Offset”. In the latter case you can overclock the processor with all Intel power-saving technologies up and running even if the CPU core voltage has been increased. We have already seen this functionality by Asus P7P55D Deluxe mainboard, while Gigabyte solutions, unfortunately, do not know how to do it yet.
The last group of parameters in the “OC Tweaker” section has come here from the “Exit” section, but I disapprove of this change. At first glance it seems reasonable and useful to have the ability to save three complete BIOS settings profiles as soon as you made all the changes you wanted. However, this is not a universal section, some of the important settings are missing. So, once you have adjusted them to your liking in other sections, you will have to go back to “OC Tweaker”. You may face additional problems trying to restore the saved settings. Before, all you needed to do was to press the left arrow key in the BIOS in order to get to the “Exit” section and choose the desired profile. Now you will have to go all the way down the relatively long “OC Tweaker” section. All in all, I am not totally against this change, but it seems to me not very well thought-through. This change makes working with profiles harder rather than easier. However, I have to stress a great new option that allows giving the saved profiles their own unique names that will remind you of their contents.
The next section after “OC Tweaker” is “Advanced”. It consists of several sub-sections.
“CPU Configuration” sub-section offers basic CPU info and allows configuring processor technologies. Namely, the functionality of this particular sub-section is exactly what’s missing in the above discussed “OC Tweaker”.
Let’s not dwell on the pretty obvious features of other sub-sections in “Advanced” and focus only on the unique BIOS reflashing system called “ASRock Instant Flash”. It scans the storage media connected to the mainboard automatically and offers to update the BIOS if it finds a suitable BIOS image.
This system does have a few drawbacks. For example, you can’t save the current BIOS version. Besides, the utility could be a little more informative. In this respect Asus mainboards are still the best: they will tell you the date and version number of your current BIOS and will tell you the number of the BIOS version you are trying to reflash. However, “ASRock Instant Flash” is faster and easier to work with than any other similar utilities out there.
“H/W Monitor” section boasts rather modest functionality. The only thing we really liked here is that you can not only set the processor fan rotation speed in dependence on the CPU temperature, but also lock the rotation speeds of three other fans at desired values.
You can set the boot-up device order in the “Boot” section, but this is no unique feature, many mainboards have it. The remarkable thing about this section is that you can not just enable or disable the startup logo, but even pick one of the three available images to your liking.
It turned out that from now on you can select one of the preset operational modes in the “Exit” section. Moreover, there is enough room in this section to also place the options for BIOS settings profiles saving and loading.
Overall, if we try to estimate the success of ASRock P55 Deluxe BIOS functionality, we can conclude that it is quite good. There are a number of questionable solutions, but there is nothing dramatically bad. We see some definite improvements since the time we last talked about ASRock mainboards. For example, you can now provide the settings profiles with their own names. So, we must give ASRock P55 Deluxe high score for the BIOS implementation. In fact, knowing that some of these features are working incorrectly, we felt inclined to lower this score right away, but we decided to play by the rules. You don’t know anything yet about the way ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard actually works, and I will pretend that I don’t know either. As a result, this board gets a B+ of the theoretical BIOS features, but we are still going to talk about the way these features work later on.
We performed all our experiments on the following test platform:
We used Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (Microsoft Windows, Version 6.1, Build 7600) operating system, Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility version 9.1.1.1019, ATI Catalyst 9.9 graphics card driver.
There is only one thing you can usually say about the mainboard’s operation in nominal mode: it works. And how could it be otherwise, as it is the most natural mode. Any operational mainboard should work flawlessly in nominal mode. However, no matter how natural this may seem, this statement underwent severe pressure from ASRock P55 Deluxe. The board is operational, but we did encounter some issues particularly in the nominal mode. And unfortunately, these were not just one or two flaws, but a number of things.
Let’s start with the fact that if you disable the startup logo, you will see the progress of the POST procedure on the screen. In particular, we are told that Intel Core i7-860 processor works at its nominal frequency of 2.8 GHz. In fact, this is not true and the actual frequency is higher not only because of the active Intel Turbo Boost technology that increases the CPU frequency when the workload appears.
But let’s not anticipate things. We boot the OS, launch Everest utility and see that all Intel processor power-saving technologies are up and running. In idle mode the CPU lowers its voltage and frequency. Only the reported voltage is somewhat lower, it is usually about 0.1 V higher. Is it a monitoring mistake? No it is not. The thing is that we enabled ASRock’s brand name power-saving technologies in the BIOS and in this case not only the number of active phases in the processor voltage regulator circuitry changes, but also the processor core voltage may be lowered if necessary.
In fact, it is a pretty popular approach used to save some extra power. Power-saving utilities of Asus or Gigabyte mainboards allow selecting a mode where the processor core voltage will be below its nominal value. As a rule, this doesn’t affect the processor stability in any way, but allows lowering its power consumption and temperature. However, we make this choice knowingly and deliberately, by default Asus and Gigabyte mainboards, unlike ASRock, send the nominal voltage to the CPU. However, we don’t have this choice here. “Intelligent Energy Saver” parameter only allows us to enable or disable power-saving, but doesn’t allow managing the modes in any way. Either power-saving is off, or the processor Vcore is being lowered – these aren’t the alternatives I would want to choose from. However, in the end we have to agree to the lowered CPU Vcore.
As we proceeded with testing of ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard, we decided to load the CPU to the utmost extent. Of course, Intel Turbo Boost technology increases the processor clock multiplier to 22x, but for some reason the base frequency also increases in this case. Instead of the processor’s nominal 133 MHz it jumped to 141 MHz!
However, we were not surprised with this unexpected development. We wanted our system to work in the most optimal way in the nominal mode that is why we selected “Load Performance Setup Default” in the “Exit” BIOS section. In this case “Overclock Mode” parameter is set to undocumented Optimized value. From our previous experience with ASRock mainboards we already know that in this mode the base frequency will increase under load. Well, this is a known trick used to provide the board with some advantage over the competitors. Just recently in our Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 mainboard review we saw that that board also increased the base clock frequency to 136.7 MHz. However, we could manually adjust the frequency on Gigabyte mainboard and return it back to the nominal 133 MHz, while on ASRock mainboard it is still set at 141 MHz. You can only see the changes when you set “Overclock Mode” parameter to Auto. Only the frequency doesn’t go back to its nominal value, it is still increased, but this time “only” to 138 MHz.
Surprisingly, inability of ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard to provide the CPU with normal core voltage is not the only issue. In addition it doesn’t allow setting the nominal values for processor and memory frequencies as well as for all other busses, which frequencies are directly connected to the base clock. I have come across mainboards that cannot ensure system stability during overclocking many times, but I could never expect to see a mainboard that can’t work in nominal mode.
Sometimes manufacturers resort to all possible and impossible tricks to ensure that their mainboard will have an advantage in allegedly identical testing conditions. ASRock seems to have turned on protection against extremely honest reviewers. No matter how hard you are trying to make sure that all mainboards work in the same fair conditions, ASRock solution will still run at a higher frequency. We do not level out the mainboards’ chances in nominal mode. Our tests show the performance provided by the mainboards with practically no user interference. Therefore, we didn’t even comment on the advantage of ASRock P55 Deluxe, as the CPU installed in it will work at 100 MHz higher frequency than the CPU in Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 (which also sets higher clocks). As for the Asus P7P55D Deluxe working at the honest nominal speeds, the advantage of a processor in an ASRock board will hit all 170 MHz. So, you can imagine how surprised we were when the anticipated indisputable victory of ASRock P55 Deluxe didn’t really turn out that obvious anymore. Take a look:
12 % advantage in memory read speed is definitely quite impressive. And 5 % advantage in heavy duty Cinebench and Fritz tests also looks very convincing. But there are no other numbers like that. Moreover, sometimes ASRock P55 Deluxe is even falling behind, although we compared it against Asus board, and not Gigabyte that also uses higher frequencies (though not as high as ASRock anyway). How did it happen that the system working at higher CPU and memory frequencies takes longer to complete the calculation of the Pi? Strange things continued when we got to the power consumption tests and discovered that ASRock was losing again, even though it lowered the processor Vcore!
As a result, we decided to undertake a paradoxical move: disable the Optimized mode and rerun the tests with “Overclock Mode” parameter set at Auto, even though in this case the frequencies wouldn’t be increased that much. The results totally surpassed our expectations. Yes, the frequencies are lower in Auto mode that is why there is nothing strange about a 2 % lag in Cinebench and Fritz tests. However, in all other cases the performance in Auto mode is about the same or even higher than in Optimized mode!
Moreover, power consumption tests, which we are going to discuss a little later today, have also become normal. So, it is certainly logical that the final comparison was performed with the Auto mode set on ASRock mainboard instead of Optimized.
I believe that the results of our investigation of ASRock P55 Deluxe performance in the nominal mode won’t really surprise you. The board gets an F for a very weird Optimized mode implementation and actual inability to ensure stable CPU performance at nominal frequency and with nominal core voltage settings.
As soon as we found out that the board increases the base processor clock, we got concerned that the board may have some problems during CPU overclocking. Luckily, it turned out that the board set the frequencies above the nominal in a correct manner. We did experience some problems during CPU overclocking on ASRock P55 Deluxe, but they were way less numerous than during our experiments in nominal mode.
At first we couldn’t find out the maximum base clock, at which the board could remain stable. We lowered the processor clock multiplier, increased the frequency, but the mainboard either wouldn’t start at all, or would start and then would reboot on its own. We had to clear CMOS, which actually means that “Boot Failure Guard” wasn’t working properly. Looked like the board was sending wrong voltage to the CPU, because once we locked it at 1.2 V, the problems disappeared. However, they have disappeared not quite completely, since we could only confirm stability at 200 MHz, and not 210 MHz as on Asus or Gigabyte boards.
By the way, trying to identify the source of the issue I noticed that I couldn’t disable Turbo Boost technology. There was simply no option in the BIOS that could allow doing so, although it used to be in the “CPU Configuration” sub-section, for sure. It turned out that “Intel TurboMode tech” parameter simply disappears when we select “Load Performance Setup Default” option. Theoretically, it is quite possible, suppose that the Optimized mode requires Intel Turbo Boost technology to be up and running. That is why the parameter is being hidden to ensure that the user doesn’t disable it without knowing. However, it would be really nice to have it back when we disable the unpredictable Optimized mode.
We could dedicate the whole entire investigation to complex and unobvious connections between different BIOS parameters of ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard. Enabling “Load Performance Setup Default” not only switches “Overclock Mode” parameter to Optimized and hides “Intel TurboMode tech” parameter, but also enables “ASRock VDrop Control” preventing the processor voktage from dropping under load. However, if we use “Intelligent Energy Saver” to enable brand name power-saving technologies, this protection immediately gets disabled. So, we are facing another dilemma here: either “ASRock VDrop Control” or “Intelligent Energy Saver”. And why don’t other manufacturers offer us the same mutually exclusive choices?
But let’s get back to CPU overclocking. Not only the maximum base clock on ASRock P55 Deluxe turned out lower than by its competitors. We had to stop our overclocking progress at 177 MHz instead of 180 MHz on Asus or Gigabyte mainboards.
However, unlike Gigabyte solution, the CPU installed in ASRock P55 Deluxe lowered not only its multiplier but also its core voltage in idle mode.
The difference in maximum CPU overclocking between Asus or Gigabyte and ASRock mainboards is only 50 MHz. this is a truly insignificant number that doesn’t seriously affect the performance, as we will see later on. However, at this point we encountered one more problem: ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard doesn’t know how to adjust the rotation speed of the processor fan depending on the core temperature. We do remember that we used to have some problems with automatic fan rotation speed adjustment on ASRock mainboards before. They use the readings off some diode from “around the processor socket” that reports extremely low temperatures. As a result, the mainboard’s response to CPU temperature increase was way too late, so we couldn’t use automatic fan rotation speed adjustment feature during CPU overclocking.
This time things got way worse. ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard offers formal functionality for that in the BIOS. However, unlike all other boards, enabling automatic adjustment doesn’t mean that your fan will immediately lower its rotation speed. By default, the speed is at its maximum – Level 9. If you want to lower it to some acceptable level, you should pick Level 4 or Level 5.
45 °C is the threshold temperature, after which the fan rotation speed should increase. However, this temperature rose to 57 °C during our overclocking experiments, and the fan rotation speed remained unchanged. 57 °C is the reading take off the same diode from “around the processor socket”, and in reality the core temperature was already at 88 °C. This is when I terminated the test not to risk the CPU health. From that moment on all the tests were performed with the fan working at its maximum rotation speed.
As a result, ASRock P55 Deluxe gets a satisfactory mark for overclocking success. It has lower maximum frequency, lower overclocking results and it can’t properly adjust the rotation speed of the processor fan. The table below sums up the overclocking related features and functionality of ASRock P55 Deluxe solution:
Now time has come to check out the performance in two different operational modes. First of all we would like to see the boards’ results in nominal mode, when the boards set the most optimal parameters on their own, without any help from the user. We used dynamic Turbo Boost implementation for our Intel Core i7-860 processor, which meant that its clock frequency multiplier could increase to 26x. As we have already mentioned, ASRock P55 Deluxe worked in Auto mode instead of the Optimized one.
The second comparison deals with the performance during maximum possible CPU overclocking. Here we used static Turbo Boost, as the highest performing one. The maximum CPU clock frequency multiplier was 22x. Our today’s hero will compete against two previously reviewed mainboards: Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and Asus P7P55D Deluxe.
This time the comparison results matched our expectations. In the nominal mode ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard outperforms its competitors in most cases, as it increases the frequencies even more than Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6, not to mention Asus P7P55D Deluxe, which is the only honest one working at the true nominal frequencies. Things change during overclocking: ASRock falls behind, because it hasn’t overclocked the CPU to the same frequencies as its opponents.
We measured the power consumption using Extech Power Analyzer 380803 device. This device was connected before the system PSU, i.e. it measured the power consumption of the entire system without the monitor, including the power losses that occur in the PSU itself. When we took the power readings in idle mode, the system was completely idle: there were even no requests sent to the hard drive at that time. We used LinX program to load the Intel Core i7-860 CPU. For more illustrative picture we created a graph showing the power consumption growth depending on the increase in CPU utilization as the number of active computational threads in LinX changed in nominal mode as well as during overclocking. For comparison purposes we also included the results for Asus P7P55D Deluxe mainboard, because it is a pretty typical representative of the LGA1156 mainboard family in terms of power consumption readings.
ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard shows pretty good results in nominal mode as well as during overclocking. It has either the same power consumption as Asus P7P55D Deluxe, or even lower one.
Actually, we have already discussed brand name utilities that go with ASRock mainboards in our article devoted to ASRcok X58 SuperComputer board. However, we came across a couple of tools that we haven’t seen before that is why we decided to get back to this topic today. These utilities are “OC DNA” and “TurboBoost”. The latter hasn’t been mentioned anywhere in the manual or on the company web-site for some reason. The reasons for this secrecy surfaced during installation procedure: the utility is made by Intel and not ASRock. However, we still feel that we need to say a few words about it anyway. This is a small entertainingly-useless tool for Windows Vista or Windows 7 side bar. It shows the CPU almost in its natural size, although you could also expand the window if you wanted to.
Its only purpose is to demonstrate the way Intel Turbo Boost technology works in real time, the way it changes the multiplier depending on the current operational load.
I really liked ASRock OC DNA program, although I couldn’t figure out where this name comes from. Maybe your settings will be able to spread over the entire planet like a genetic code? This utility allows saving BIOS settings profiles on external storage media. It allows exchanging profiles, because it also can save the image file back into the BIOS. And that’s it. But it doesn’t really need to do anything else. It is simple and handy.
I have to admit that I was very frustrated with the IES (Intelligent Energy Saver) tool. It is just as useless as TurboBoost. Doesn’t do much, just displays the amount of saved energy. It included itself into Start Up programs list and launched after every OS reboot that I why I eventually had to remove it.
Moreover, it has also replaced the power-saving Windows 7 profile with its own one, though maybe it was Instant Boot that in fact did it. This utility speeds up the OS boot-up time due to effective use of Sleep and Hibernation modes. It is pretty handy.
Bulky and inconvenient “OC Tuner” tool is not totally useless, but it is not too appealing to work with.
Well, let’s sum up the results of our today’s experience with ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard. The board got an excellent mark for design and functionality and this mark stays intact. The engineers have every right to be proud of their creation. We still feel inclined to lower the good mark for BIOS functionality. It only looks good, but when you try to actually work with it, all sorts of problems emerge that is why we can only settle for a satisfactory here. We were honestly shocked with the way the board worked in nominal mode. In fact, the board is unable to provide proper nominal mode and the inadequate Optimized mode only improves its performance in really heavy tasks, while in all other applications the results appear lower than we would expect them to be. That is why it is a failure here. Overclocking on ASRock P55 Deluxe is not ideal, but the difference between this board and solutions from Asus or Gigabyte is not dramatic at all. We could give the board a good mark, but the non-operational fan rotation speed adjustment ruined it all. The joy from performance increase during overclocking is spoilt by the howling of the fan working at its maximum speed. Therefore, only a satisfactory mark for overclocking success.
So, what do we end up with? Pretty low resulting score, I should say. And it turned out decent mostly due to excellent exterior and pretty good theoretical functionality, rather than practical achievements. But we buy mainboards not for aesthetic purposes or for long list of technical specs. Mainboards should work properly, and unfortunately, it may be tricky with ASRock P55 Deluxe. Unpredictable errors and unjustified complications await us even in those places where nothing points to them.
As a result, it is hard for me to define the main target group for ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard. We often say that the drawbacks of ASRock mainboards are compensated by their low and attractive price, but let’s think for a second. Those users who want flawless operation in nominal as well as overclocked mode, will go for Asus P7P55D Deluxe, for example. Those who have reasons to believe that $220 is way too much for an Intel P55 Express based mainboard, will buy something less sophisticated. Some Asus or Gigabyte solution for around $120-$160 or less, if the requirements are really minimal. So who will go for an ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard for $180? What will determine this choice? An additional SATA3 card? Tomorrow similar controllers will appear on other mainboards and today there is no real use for them yet. So who will go specifically for ASRock P55 Deluxe? I think those users who already have an ASRock mainboard and have been very happy with it that’s why they would prefer to stay with the favorite brand. Well, as always, the choice is yours.