jmke

As we've discussed in our Intel Core i5 review, the company's new range of Lynnfield processors sport some quite radical changes from their bigger Nehalem-based brothers, and this is of course also reflected in the design of the P55 motherboard chipset sported by ASUS' P7P55D.

Lynnfield does away with Nehalem's triple-channel memory controller for a dual-channel derivative, and thus P55 motherboards only require the more typical four DIMM slot configuration, while Lynnfield's on-die memory controller actually handles memory support itself of course, with support for DDR3 alone the order of the day. Also added to the CPU die itself is a PCI Express 2.0 controller with sixteen lanes of bandwidth, which also alleviates this requirement from the motherboard chipset itself from a discrete graphics perspective, although the P55 chipset still supports eight PCI Express lanes itself for additional expansion slots and devices.

http://www.elitebastards.com/index.p...d=13&Itemid=27

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