Asus complete P55 line up

[sholvaco]

The D version without false 3rd PCI-Ex looks good,could be better with angled sata...already took my decision:UD4 or GD65
Is there only a sata port difference between the pro and the evo?

That "false" 3rd PCIe costs next to nothing in terms of engineering effort and provides the user an extra x4 slot for everything from sound cards to RAID cards to network cards... why anyone would be against it, is beyond my capacity to reason. BTW the "vanilla" board (the only D version would be the Deluxe, the D in these boards' family name "P7P55D" stands for Xtreme Design) doesn't even provide an option for SLI/CF setup. Since there are no lane switches in sight the slots run at x16 by x4 (PCH driven), so by your logic it only has one real x16 slot and the other one is the "false" x4. Why did they even bother adding the fake one, right?

i dont know what chips this one uses... but previously asus used the same chip they use on their xonar soundcards iirc, and those are very good...
not the best soundcard you can get but close afaik

The bundled audio modules use the same trick the Quantum Force SONAR X-FI modules did: move the codec to a PCIe daughterboard and add some Creative hardware like the X-Fi crystalizer and maybe better filtering. The ADI codecs (there were more versions) used on these modules are the same as the ones they use on their high-end onboard integrated audio solutions. The ASUS Xonar cards on the other hand use a dedicated audio processor (an ASUS branded C-Media OxygenHD).