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Gaming
Now, let's take a look at the kind of gaming performance on offer from these parts with a PCI Express 2.0 supporting Radeon HD 4890 1GB in place, at a resolution of 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.
Starting out with Left 4 Dead, as you might expect in such a GPU-limited scenario there is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage for either motherboard over its rival in this situation.
Our Core i7 and Intel X58-based system shows a small advantage as we move on to look at Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, but it's still hardly a large enough performance delta to write home about.
Overclocking
If you're looking to pick up a Lynnfield-based system with overclocking in mind, you'll want to know how far you can stably push your shiny new CPU on any given motherboard, so let's take a peek at how the P7P55D functions from an overclocking standpoint.
From our stock clock speed of 2.66GHz, and with Noctua's excellent NH-U12P cooler strapped to the CPU (complete with the correct LGA 1156 mounting kit - Many thanks to Noctua themselves for providing one at short notice), we easily and stably reached a final overclock of 4GHz with our Core i5 750 sample. This was achieved by using a multiplier of 21x (normally only used by Intel's own Turbo mode but available for manual selection via ASUS P7P55D motherboard), a base clock of 190MHz, setting the QPI interface speed to 6086MHz (the lowest possible when using those particular clock and multiplier settings) and upping the CPU core voltage to 1.3 Volts.
This configuration gave us absolute, rock-solid stability at 4GHz no matter what we threw at our CPU, while temperatures under load using our Noctua cooler sat at around the sixty degree mark. We made several attempts to move beyond this clock speed towards 4.2GHz, but our CPU simply wouldn't run stably at these higher speeds no matter how we adjusted voltages and the like, leaving us to settle for "just" 4GHz.
Now, the burning question is how much extra performance do our overclocking efforts afford us? Let's take a look, using a couple of our previously run benchmarks for comparison.
x264's High Definition video encoding test is first out of the gate, demonstrating a massive 48% increase in performance in this benchmark's all-important, CPU intensive second encoding pass.
Cinebench running in 64-bit mode shows us similar results, with a performance increase of over 48% in multi-threaded mode. These gains prove to be even larger when running this benchmark in a single-threaded configuration, with a vast 72% performance increase at 4GHz compared to our stock clock speed. Fantastic results, and it certain looks from these numbers as though even one of ASUS' cheaper P55 motherboard offerings has plenty of overclocking potential to offer.
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