Unregistered said:
The P7P55D-E has no PLX solution? Good or bad?? God da** i allready ordered....
Correct, the non-PRO does not feature the PLX chip. It's not "good", but I still don't know whether it's bad, either. Soon, I'll be getting in S-ATA and USB 3.0 devices in order to test things out, but as it stands, I
really don't think the PLX chip is going to make a major difference in the performance of either the 3.0 devices or the GPU. I'd only be concerned if you are looking to add in a
high bandwidth card, like an HD 5970.
DragonFire said:
Fan control: To be honest, I have no idea. I meant to look into it after the article was posted, but time hasn't allowed it. I'll touch base with ASUS again and see if I can get a specific answer to this. I looked through our BIOS screenshots, and there doesn't seem to be a section for advanced fan control.
If fan control is really important to you, you may like to consider EVGA's P55 FTW, as it seems unmatched in that regard:
http://techgage.com/article/evga_p55_ftw/3 (Pictures 4 & 5)
PLX bridge: This chip is
not what offers either of the 3.0 technologies... those are handled by separate chips on the motherboard. At this point in time, all USB 3.0 motherboards include a chip manufactured by NEC, and for S-ATA 3.0, the chip is from Marvell. This may change as time passes and other companies begin to trickle out their own chips.
Both 3.0 technologies share the PCI-Express bandwidth, and because that's limited on the P55 platform, it means that some component will have to suffer with slightly degraded performance. Without a PLX bridge, using either 3.0 device would decrease the primary PCI-E x16 slot to x8 speeds, meaning half the bandwidth. The PLX bridge almost remedies this 100% because it takes available PCI-E lanes from the PCH, and splits those into two halves, one for USB and the other for S-ATA.
The PCI-E lanes that the PLX chip creates are 500MB/s each, so in essence, we're
still not dealing with a full speed S-ATA 6Gbit/s port, since that's roughly 600MB/s. But as it stands today, even the highest-end consumer SSDs on a S-ATA 3.0 bus would come nowhere near the theoretical limit, so for the most part, this issue doesn't matter.
Because the X58 platform has a lot of available PCI-Express bandwidth, there's no need for a PLX bridge, nor will the PCI-E slots degrade in performance when using either or both 3.0 technologies.
Hope this helps, and thanks to both of you for the nice comments!
