Let's start off by taking a quick look at the ASUS P7P55D Premium motherboard, starting first with the expansion slots and working our way over to the LGA1156 CPU socket.

Videocard PCI Express 2.0 x16 (x16 and x8/x8) expansion slots.

Dual-sided VGA release locks make removing big videocards much easier when the heatsink blocks the tab.

In the lower left corner we find the P55 Express chipset behind a large flat heatsink. The P55 Express PCH has six 3Gb/s SATA II ports which can run in RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 modes. ASUS adds another two 6Gb/s SATA II ports.

Two (gray) SATA III ports are provided by a Marvell controller.

The SATA III ports are provided by this Marvell controller.

The large heatsink removed, the Intel P55 Express chipset is exposed.

ASUS's P7P55D Premium supports up to 16GB of DDR3 1066/1333/1600/2133MHz memory in four DIMMs. Along the bottom edge of the board is the ATX 24-pin power connector, IDE connector and MemOK! button.

The P7P55D Premium motherboard supports Intel's 1156-pin socket. This socket requires an 1156-pin Core i5 700-series or Core i7 800-series CPU, as well as a compatible heatsink.

CMOS reset button on the rear IO. The blue USB ports are USB 2.0, not USB 3.0. For the P7P55D Premium, the USB 3.0 NEC controller is not installed, so although these blue ports are physically USB 3.0 ports, they only operate at USB 2.0 levels.

Physically the port at right is USB 3.0, but on the P7P55D Premium motherboard it operates at USB 2.0 speeds because there is no NEC USB 3.0 controller... Frankly ASUS comes off like it's trying to confuse users who will automatically assume blue port = USB 3.0. In this case, it does not.

Let's see how far we can overclock the ASUS P7P55D Premium motherboard when paired up with an Intel Core i5 processor. Overclocking is up next!