Introduction



At first I would like to thank ASRock for making this review possible by offering me their P55 Deluxe3 Motherboard for testing and reviewing!




About ASRock:

“ ASRock Inc., established in 2002, target at entry to mainstream segment MB business, is an energetic company with the combination of technology and humanity. Devoting efforts to bring customers the innovative and reliable motherboards with the design concept of 3C, ""Creative, Considerate, Cost-effective"", ASRock has successfully established a well-known leading brand of the best price-performance motherboard in the industry. ASRock products' high recognition stems from company’s devotion to bring the most cost-performance products to users.

Besides creative features and solid products, ASRock engineers also pay special attention to EMI, thermal, acoustics and details to achieve complete customer satisfaction. In addition to price-performance, creative and considerate features, ASRock also pay special on the issue of eco-environmental protection with the release of ROHS products and energy saving functions to save the environment.

To succeed in this ultra-competitive industry, ASRock provides great products with speed-to-market, cost and service to customers.

Facing the constantly changing technologies of motherboard, ASRock will always keep the vision of the future and develop future-proof products upon our 3C design concept to our customers.

It is the commitment to our customers and products, like the spirit presented in our maxim:

"Motherboard, We Master It!”

Packaging:

The P55 Deluxe3 motherboard from ASRock comes in a nice designed cardboard box, with a handle; on the frontal part we can see the company logo, some icons that describe the supported CPUs and the included chipset; in the center, the “True 333” technology logo can be seen which means that this board features USB 3.0, SATA3 and also eSATA3, but also the motherboard name; further down, we can see listed some of the included software bundle with is mainly composed from some trials; finally, we can see some icons that describe the supported technologies, but also the Turbo Boost Monitor widget from Intel:



On the back of the box, we can see a photo of the board with some explanations along with many of the board features; on the bottom, we can see the description of the included ASRock applications, and the full product specifications:



The inside of the box has two layers; on the top part we can find the bundle, along with the manuals and installation CD and on the bottom, the actual motherboard can be found:



In the box, we can find as a bundle:

-4 SATA cables
-one I/O shield
-two SATA to Molex power adapters
-one Installation CD
-UATA100 and floppy cables
-a SLI bridge
-an Installation manual



The Installation manual is written in multiple languages, with a lot of explanations and drawings, to assure that no errors will be made, no matter the experience level of the user:



At the end of the manual, we can even find the POST codes, which will help us identify any problem that may appear during boot-up:



The motherboard is located in the second layer of the box and is protected inside an anti-static bag:

The layout of the motherboard looks really good, considering that it has some extra components compared to the non “3” model; the VRM cooling system is efficient enough even for some overclocking, as I have observed in the past while testing out their P55 Extreme board; the two PCI-Express slots are placed with a lot of space between each other to allow mounting without problems two video cards in SLI, even dual-slot models:



The audio chip that can be found on the motherboard is a VIA VT2020, which is a 10-channel high definition audio codec:



The Nuvoton NCT6771F is the Super I/O chip. Nuvoton is a Winbond company:



The Realtek RTL8111DL is the Gigabit Ethernet controller on this motherboard:



NEC D720200F1 is a PCIe to USB 3.0 Controller and can be found on many other motherboards or add-on cards:



The ICS 9LPRS140CKLF represents the clock generator on this motherboard:



The ExpressLane PLX PEX8608-BA50BC low power switch offers 8 PCI Express Gen 2 lanes, capable of configuring up to 8 flexible ports:



On the board we can also find a VIA VT631N PCI-Express 1394 Host Controller:



The Marvell SATA 6GB/s controller can be found hidden right under the chipset cooler:



For expansion, we have available two PCI-Express x1 slots, two PCI-Express x16 ones and also two PCI:



On the bottom of the board, we can find a CD_IN header, the HD_AUDIO and HDMI_SPDIF headers, but also a Floppy, COM and 1394 header:

A little to the right, we can find 3 USB 2.0 headers, the Dr. Debug LED display, the Power button and Reset button, but also the CMOS battery:



To the right of the CMOS battery, a Clear CMOS jumper can be found, the power LED header, the Speaker Header and System Front Panel Header; near them, the Winbond chip which holds the BIOS can be found (it is also socketed, for easy removal):



This board does also feature six SATA II connectors, colored in dark blue and near them we can find an IDE connector, in light blue color:



Near the IDE connector, we can find two SATA III connectors, the ATX 24-pin power connector, two fan headers and a TPM header:



The memory slots are colored differently, to identify more easily the channels:



The MOSFET heatsink solution is efficient enough and it can be also found on the P55 Deluxe and P55 Extreme:



Here is a close-up on the MOSFET heatsink, when looking from the top:



Here is also a lateral view of the heatsink, where we can see the heatpipe termination, the top cap which holds the ASRock logo and a portion of the little thermal pad; here we can also see the plastic push-pin which is used to hold the heatsink properly fixed on the MOSFETs:



This motherboard has mounting holes for the new LGA1156 coolers, but also the LGA775 ones, so people that want to keep their old cooling solution do not need to change it; I find this a very useful feature, especially for the people that want to keep their old LGA775 waterblock:



The chipset heatsink does have on top the ASRock logo:



In the top left corner of the board, we can find the ATX12V 8-pin connector, another fan header and a USB power jumper:



The external board connectors are the following:

-PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
-Clear CMOS switch
-Optical SPDIF out port
-Coaxial SPDIF out port
-powered eSATA3/USB 2.0 connector
-5xUSB 2.0 ports
-Firewire port
-2xUSB 3.0 ports
-LAN RJ45 port
-audio ports

The board BIOS

On the first boot-up, we are shown one of the pre-existing splash screens; these can be changed from the BIOS menu:



The POST screen is similar to the ASRock motherboards I have tested in the past; this one shows on the top the motherboard model along with the BIOS version, the installed CPU and its current speed, some options to run Setup, the Instant Flash utility or display the Boot menu; here we can also see the mode memory runs at, the total memory size, installed HDDs:



The BIOS setup utility is split into multiple sub-menus; the Main tab shows us detailed information regarding the installed CPU and memory; here we can also adjust the time and date:



On the OC Tweaker menu, we can see multiple automatic overclocking settings like Turbo 50, CPU EZ OC and Memory EZ OC; I would not recommend them if you are an advanced user, because, for example, when you set a pre-defined frequency for the CPU, the voltage that this pre-programed is much higher that expected (4.0GHz) and might overheat your CPU unnecessary; here we can also set the memory XMP setting and the pre-programmed profiles are also displayed in grey color; the Intelligent Energy Saver and Good Night LED features can be also set here, along with the Overclock mode or the Boot Failure Guard feature. Also here, we can set the CPU ratio and the QPI frequency:



Further down, but in the same menu, we can set the custom DRAM timings, adjust the voltages or save our modified settings, in 3 separate slots:



Here are the options available under Turbo 50, CPU EZ and Memory EZ:





Here are also the custom memory timings settings that we can set:



In the Advanced menu, we can set options like CPU configuration, Chipset Configuration, ACPI Configuration and so on; from this menu we can also launch the ASRock Instant Flash utility:



In the CPU Configuration sub-menu, we can set the CPU ratio, the Virtualization, enable/disable the CPU Thermal Throttling or set how many CPU cores to have active; here we can also enable/disable the SpeedStep technology or the Turbo mode (if the CPU supports it):



In the Chipset Settings sub-menu, we can set which graphics adapter to initialize first, enable/disable the integrated audio codec, LAN or 1394 Firewire interface:



In the ACPI Settings sub-menu, we can enable/disable the Check Ready Bit option (must be left on disabled if using a SSD, otherwise the system won’t be able to wake up properly from S3) and other usual ACPI settings we can find on most of the motherboards:



In the Storage Configuration sub-menu, we can set the SATA operation mode for both SATA II and the Marvell SATA III controller; here we can also see the list of the detected HDDs or optical drives:



The Marvell SATA III controller has an interface of its own:



In the Super I/O Chipset sub-menu, we can enable/disable the onboard floppy controller, set the Serial Port address or the Infrared Port address:



In the USB Configuration sub-menu, we can set options regarding the USB 2.0 interfaces:



The H/W Monitor menu gives us information regarding the CPU/motherboard temperatures, the RPM of the installed fans, but also the voltages; in this menu we can also set the speed of the fans:



In the Boot menu, we can set options regarding the Boot configuration, and set the priority of the boot devices:



The Boot Settings Configuration sub-menu offers us the possibility to change the splash screen, boot from onboard LAN or enable/disable the bootup num-lock:



The options we can choose from as a boot splash screen are the following:



Finally, in the Security menu, we can set supervisor or user passwords:

Testbench:

CPU : Intel I5 750 Retail
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12P SE2
Motherboard : ASRock P55 Deluxe3
RAM : G.Skill Ripjaws F3-12800CL8D-4GBRM
Video : ATI RADEON 4890 1GB with custom cooling
Power Supply : Cooler Master UCP 700W
HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10



I had no issues getting to 4GHz with this board:



Here is also the CPU-Z validation, along with the link:



To extract more detailed information about the motherboard, I have used the Everest Ultimate Edition utility:





The ASRock board comes with the IES application, which, when turned on, shows us the saved energy in a specific period of time, the CPU frequency along with its voltage and the number of phases in use at the time:




Another application from ASRock is the OC Tuner, which we can use to monitor the temperature, fan speeds or modify the fans RPM; we can use it to do also overclocking on-the-fly or control the voltages:



Finally, the OC DNA application can be used to save our BIOS setting in a file and share it with our friends with the help of the internet or other storage media:

Synthetic benchmarks

3DMark 2001



3DMark 2003



3DMark 2005



3DMark 2006



3DMark Vantage



*The Vantage scores were calculated by summing up the GPU and CPU subscores

Here are the Vantage subscores separately:

Subscore



PCMark 2005



PCMark Vantage



FurMark



Cinebench R10



CrystalMark



SuperPI 32MB

Games Benchmarks

Street Fighter 4



Left 4 Dead



Crysis



World in Conflict



Unreal Tournament 3



FarCry 2



Devil May Cry 4

Conclusive Thoughts

The P55 Deluxe3 motherboard from ASRock was nice to work with; it offers lots of BIOS options but also some pre-defined settings for beginner users. The cooling that this board uses for the MOSFETs is very good and it was only a little warm in high stress environment like 15 minutes of OCCT to determine system stability.

The bundle that ASRock offers on the CD is full of applications, but, unfortunately, most of them are trial versions. I would have proffered this board to come with a full version license of the X-FI MB software, which enhances the audio experience with the onboard CODEC.

There are also some ASRock utilities included, that help us to overclock on-the-fly, see the amount of energy saved or save our BIOS settings and share them with our friends (in the case they have identical setups as ours).

The SATA600, USB 3.0 and eSATA III are some very nice additions to the board so we will be able to connect lots of compatible devices when more will be available on the market; having the chips integrated on the motherboard is also a good thing because we do not have to install additional cards to occupy extra slots and space inside the case.

This motherboard is also compatible with AIWI and App Charger.

At ~$180 this ASRock motherboard hovers between value and mid-range, offering future proof features with a mainstream CPU socket; not quite the budget board we’re used to from ASRock, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, seeing as the increased price also translates into a more feature rich product.



I would like to thank ASRock for making this review possible!