ASUS announces P55 motherboards

TAIWANESE TECH manufacturer ASUS has announced details of its latest motherboards, the P7P55D Series.

The firm said that the series boasts the Intel P55 Express chipset along with its own made-up 'Hybrid' technology, which enables advanced overclocking and improved power management, the company claims. ASUS also says the P7P55D Series is its first to support 6Gbps SATA I/O bandwidth.

Power efficiency has also been improved with the firm's Stack Cool 3+ and T.Probe, management tools that offer users real time monitoring and control of system performance and temperature.

The firm announced six motherboards in total that make up the P7P55D range. ASUS also announced some gamer-centric motherboards too, but you don't want to read about those during work hours. When you get home after work you can look those up on the ASUS website.

Meanwhile MSI launched its Xtreme Speed mainboard series. These also include the P55 chipset and add support for Intel's Lynnfield Core i7 and Core i5 processors. Overclocking on the Xtreme Speed boards can be handled by MSI's OC Genie, which will automatically search for the best BIOS settings for the board in order to boost performance. MSI said that this takes all of about one second.

MSI is offering a fifty per cent discount on its Xtreme Speed motherboards. Pricing starts at £85.50 including VAT.

We'll be testing one of those MSI boards shortly. µ