Asus P7P55D-E

[JimW1949]

I am not sure why I am writing this, I guess I am just curious if anybody has found the same problem.

I am using an ASUS P7P55D-E motherboard in my latest build, and it works just fine, not problems to speak of. I like the board and everything, but there is one thing that was not well thought out. They put the EIDE connector so that it is located right at the end of the video card. That means if you have large video card, which I do, the connector is covered up by the end of the video card. That was not a very good idea and I have to think that ASUS dropped the ball on that one. Other than that, the motherboard is really good.

I am not currently using the EIDE slot, because I don't have anything that I want to put on that connector. I am using all SATA drives, so I don't really need it. But a guy gave me a Zip drive and I was going to install it, but that is when I ran into a major hassle to try and connect the cable to the EIDE connector.

It took me quite awhile to get it connected, and I had to remove the video card, not a big deal but it is still a poor design. Even with the video card removed it is difficult to connect the cable because the EIDE connector is on the side of the board and not the top so you have to come in from the side and with my case there wasn't a lot of clearance.

Once I got it connected, the Zip drive was bad so I took it out and forgot about it. I spent a lot of time screwing around for nothing. Oh well, not a big deal, it gave me something to do.

 

[BoomerD]

I've got the P7P55D-E Pro. Same basic setup for the PATA connector. Not a big deal IMO, because all it takes is to remove the video card, plug in the PATA cable, connect it to your device, reinstall the video card, and you're good to go.

Of course, my GTX460 isn't all that long...and doesn't quite cover the PATA connector...

 

[JimW1949]

Apparently my case must be smaller than your case, I don't very much room from the edge of the motherboard to the metal brackets where the drives are located. Plus, I have a fairly large size video card, it takes up 2 slots and the video card extends over the edge of the motherboard where the EIDE connector is.

The video card I have is a Radeon HD 6850 with 1gb of DDR5 RAM. Like I said in my first post, it isn't really a big deal, but I would think that a company like ASUS who has been building motherboards for quite some time would have engineered this a little bit better than what they did.