Power Consumption and Conclusions
Power consumption
The P55 Deluxe was on par with its competitors in the idle power tests, but during load testing it posted the second highest wattage of the bunch. The wattage during our load tests seems to coincide with very high CPU temps that spiked to 99c on some cores. This is much too high for this processor, especially when its only running at 3.8GHz or lower.
Performance
The performance results we tallied during our benchmarks left us feeling pretty good about the P55 Deluxe. We initially had our reservations, but it’s always good to come into a review with an open mind and just let the facts tell us all we need to know about the product. The P55 Deluxe performed very well during our gaming benchmarks, but lagged behind a bit in our general computing tests. This tells us that the board was made for basic gamers who also like to dabble in simple overclocking to give them a 10 to 15 percent boost in performance. While we are on the subject of overclocking, the P55 Deluxe didn’t give us a warm fuzzy when we tried to use their CPU EZ OC option in the BIOS. The main issue we had wasn’t with the settings being used in the BIOS, but more about the temperature issues we noticed when we were validating if our overclock was stable or not. Getting temps around 99c will definitely degrade the lifespan of our processor and we will investigate further into why we were seeing such high temps from relatively low overclocks.
Features
The bundled software and features attached to the P55 Deluxe is very well put together. The additional 6GB/s add-on card is a great value and really adds validity to the board’s overall price point. Support for triple CrossfireX and SLI configurations suggests they really want a slice of the high-end, enthusiast gamer market, and for those users who drop more than a $1,000 on video cards, they will probably be looking for an affordable mobo too. The rest of the board’s features are pretty standard in comparison to other boards in the P55 class. The BIOS tweaks were decent overall, but I have some concerns about the CPU and memory EZ OC options. These concerns are strictly based off the overclocking numbers we attempted to get during testing. But, ASRock did give us the option to manually overclock the CPU, which is always needed for users who want to attempt their own overclock.
Pricing and Availability
As of April 25, the ASRock P55 Deluxe was available at Newegg.com for $154.99. This board is also available at several other online vendors like Amazon.com for $139.99 and MWave.com for $149.99.
Final Thoughts
We like to thank ASRock for providing the P55 Deluxe for our review today. This board truly has a ton of features, and at $149, it is a steal for users looking to upgrade to SATA 6GB/s as well as triple graphics cards with Eyefinity or 3DVision. The dual heatsink mounting holes for two different socket types was a very nice touch as well as the board’s overall layout and construction. The sturdiness of the board never came into question and it performed very well during most of our synthetic benchmarks. There seems to be a little bit of room for improvement in the overclocking and general computing categories, but overall it was a pleasant surprise to see this board do so well against some of the giants in the motherboard industry like ASUS and Gigabyte. The P55 Deluxe might be one of the best budget buys for LGA 1156 in terms of performance, style, and available features.
