Board Layout

As we look at the boards, it comes as no surprise that the layouts of the boards are very similar. The Intel DP55KG has a few more options that are on the board, and the colors are different, but other than the layout is exactly the same.

The Intel DP55WG

The layout is clean and makes for an easy setup of your system.

Our 24-pin power connector is at the top right of the board, right next to the edge, which is a perfect placement. Just underneath that is where you find the pins for your front panel connections. This area of the board is also where we find our dimm slots. Both the DP55WG and DP55KG boards support up to 16GB of DDR3 memory running at speeds of 1600/1333/1066. There is also a power button at the top corner of the board, which is great for testing.

A close up view of the front panel pins and some of the headers on the board…

The bottom right of the board sports an aluminum heatsink on the chipset. We had no issues at all with heat on the board. You can also see the SATA connectors here at the edge of the board. Take a look from the other side:

Here they are again. The DP55WG has six SATA ports that are powered by the P55 chipset. The board does support Intel Matrix Storage Technology, and is Raid 0, 1, 5 and 10 capable.

The bottom left is where we find our PCI and PCI Express slots. The Intel DP55WG has one PCI-E x16 slot that is capable of scaling to dual x8 graphics. There is also one x4 PCI-E slot, two x1 PCI-E slots and two PCI expansion slots.

At the very bottom left of the board is an auxiliary PCI-Express graphics power connector.

The DP55WG has the Realtek ALC889 audio codec which supports 10 channel audio. LAN is provided by the Intel Pro Wireless 10/100/1000 (82578DC). There are a few more headers on the board here as well, so I might as well mention that the board supports up to 14 total USB ports and 2 firewire ports.

The top left is the location of the CPU socket. I cannot see that there would be any issue at all with any aftermarket cooler that is designed for the LGA1156 socket. The 8-pin 12v connector is at the top of the board near the edge, which is ideal.

Intel includes a post code LED display on these boards, which helps to diagnose issues you may have at bootup.

The I/O ports on the Intel DP55WG include the audio jacks, S/PDIF in and out, 8 USB jacks, a firewire port and a LAN port.

The Intel DP55KG

As we said, these boards are very similar, so we will highlight any differences that are on the DP55KG motherboard.

No differences to speak of here….

The bottom right on the DP55KG has a couple of additions. First of all, there are two more SATA ports on this board.

There is also a Skull printed on the KG board. There is a setting on the board that makes the eyes flash with Hard Disk activity.

There is also a bluetooth module on this board.

The bottom right…

The Intel DP55KG has heatsinks on its power components and has two additional power phases.

There is also an internal USB connection.