Asus P55 mobo pictured and in detail

THE WORD IN  Taiwan  is that motherboards based on Intel’s new P55 chipset won’t hit the streets until September, but that hasn’t stopped plenty of motherboard manufacturers from showing off their P55 wares. We’ve already had a sneak glimpse of P55 boards from DFI , MSI and Biostar, and now we’ve also got some decent photos of Asus' forthcomingP7P55-Pro.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary about this board, but it looks as though it’s going to offer all the essentials without any fancy frills. The cooling system, for example, isn’t even remotely outlandish, but this should hopefully mean that the board is quiet and reasonably priced.

A simple pair of passive heatsinks are attached to the voltage regulator modules (VRMs) around the LGA1156 socket, while a small heatsink also sits on the chipset itself. This just goes to show how little work a new Intel chipset has to perform when the CPU has an integrated memory controller.

Meanwhile, two 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots will enable you to install two graphics cards, although Asus wouldn’t confirm or deny whether the board supports SLI and CrossFire. There are also four DDR3 DIMM slots that support dual-channel memory configurations, which use the new retention-clip system that Asus introduced with the Rampage II Gene X58-based motherboard.

There’s no floppy drive connector for fans of archaic storage media, but a single EIDE connector sits on the edge of the board, and there are seven S-ATA II connectors on the board, plus an eSATA port on the back. Also on the back you’ll find an optical digital audio output, eight USB 2.0 ports and six audio jacks for eight-channel audio. Meanwhile, two PS/2 ports and a 1Gbit/sec Ethernet port complete the line-up of ports on the rear panel.

There’s currently no word on pricing for the board, or the release date for that matter, but hopefully the P7P55 Pro won’t be too expensive with the features on offer. We now just need to wait for Intel to officially launch its Core i5 CPUs and P55 chipset, and this is looking increasingly like it’s going to happen at the beginning of September. µ