In this article, the reader will get acquainted with the Asus P7H55 motherboard , designed to install Intel processors. An overview of this product will be of interest to those customers who wish to purchase a gaming segment device in a budget class. Specifications, reviews and expert recommendations will help users make a choice before buying.
The range of interfaces in the motherboard Asus P7H55
This motherboard, unlike analogues in the computer market, has one important feature - the presence of all the necessary interfaces and connectors for connecting peripherals. The truth is very confusing for many owners of the form factor of the motherboard. After all, a pile of connectors on the mATX board creates inconvenience when connecting devices.
Along with a large assortment of interfaces, the Asus P7H55 motherboard is available on the market at a decent price (up to 5,000 rubles). However, for this, technologists took a small step backwards in the walls of Asus and installed conventional capacitors instead of standard solid-state drives. Also on the board, the owner can find many controllers that do not have Asus branding.
First meeting
The fact that the Asus P7H55 motherboard belongs to the budget class is evidenced not only by its cost, but also by the package bundle. In addition to the main device, in the box the owner will find a brief instruction manual, driver discs, a blank for the rear panel and two cables: SATA and ATA. In user reviews, there is a lot of negative to the manufacturer regarding the impossibility of connecting several SATA disks to the system - you need to buy interface cables in the store, which is very inconvenient.
There are questions to the manufacturer regarding the adapters for connecting components to the system power supply. However, according to experts, this issue should lie on the shoulders of the manufacturers of the power supply. After all, according to the world standard, all the necessary connectors must be on the power supply.
What results in compactness and cost reduction?
As the owners assure with reviews in the media, the Asus P7H55 motherboard is not designed to increase performance through overclocking. The whole problem is the availability of free space for installing a powerful cooler on the processor. Condensers arranged in several rows around the perimeter of the processor socket will not allow installing a powerful cooling system.
The pursuit of compactness has led to the fact that the user may have problems installing proprietary RAM modules with cooling lattices on the side faces. The same high capacitors placed right next to the DDR3 connectors do not allow memory modules to be inserted into the slot. Fortunately, capacitors block access to the interface on one side only. The presence of 4 receivers for memory modules can partially solve the problem of installing custom brackets.
Expansion Cards and Video Controllers
Owners of Asus P7H55, who have PCI devices for connection (TV tuner, sound adapter or network card), were more fortunate with the purchase than others. After all, the manufacturer, in addition to the standard PCIex16 interface, provided its product with two PCI interfaces and one PCIex1 port. The motherboard is equipped with video output connectors (analog VGA interface and digital DVI outputs with HDMI). True, to output the video signal, you will need a processor with an integrated video core.
In terms of connecting hard drives, users also will not have problems. The motherboard has 6 corresponding SATA connectors. In addition, they are placed quite compactly, near the basket for installing disks. Owners of old optical drives with an IDE interface will also be pleased. The board has a corresponding connector.
Motherboard specifications
The motherboard is based on the Intel H55 chipset and is designed to install all processors of the Intel Core i7 / i5 / i3 line, as well as Pentium processors that are installed on the LGA 1156 socket. There are four DDR3 interface sockets for installing RAM that support the operation of the modules on frequencies 1066-2200 MHz. The maximum supported memory capacity is 16 GB. The interface for connecting hard drives works according to the SATAIII standard, but the creation of arrays at the hardware level does not support.
As can be seen from the review, for the Asus P7H55 motherboard, the technical specifications look pretty attractive, although they have a number of limitations. But as practice shows, only the units of users for every million customers use the same RAID array. All owners are more interested in the bandwidth and stability that the motherboard can demonstrate in games and working with demanding applications.
Decent BIOS
But at first glance, the unremarkable BIOS, which does not have a built-in graphical shell, clearly hints to the owner that overclocking is the basic functionality for the Asus P7H55 motherboard. Settings and power management are possible for both the processor and RAM with a video adapter. And do not think that the user is only given a choice of actions from the recommended list. There are also settings with manual data entry, as is implemented on gaming motherboards.
The only drawback that all owners of this motherboard complain in their reviews is the language pack that the BIOS is equipped with. The manufacturer provided it with six popular languages, among which there is no Russian. And if you consider that the operating instructions are written in English, then many users may have problems setting up the system.
Drivers & Software
Owners of the Asus P7H55 motherboard do not need to sit for hours on the Internet to install the necessary utilities to install drivers and all the necessary software for overclocking the platform. Asus was ahead of all its competitors in this matter, bringing together all the necessary set on one disk. All utilities and drivers have a convenient multimedia shell, which in a few minutes will install the software the user needs on the computer.
As a tool for overclocking the processor and memory by changing the voltage on the motherboard, the manufacturer selected the TurboV EVO program. The fact is that this is the only stably working product that can overclock the integrated graphics core on Intel processors. True, many owners, judging by their reviews, believe that all operations with an increase in the frequency should be done in the BIOS (less time is spent on checking stability after rebooting the computer).
Testing and overclocking
The performance of the Asus P7H55 M motherboard , whose characteristics are more dependent on the processor, memory and video card, is difficult to measure. Therefore, many test laboratories focus not on performance, but on the stability of the system during overclocking (constant voltage, heating, no failures and failures at maximum loads). That's where the representative of the budget class was able to surprise all users who wanted to test this motherboard and compare it with more expensive representatives of the computer market.
Autumn high stability and productivity in the work is guaranteed by the introduction of some innovations from the manufacturer Asus. This is a 6-phase system for powering the processor, proprietary technologies for BIOS protection, intelligent overclocking and cooling system control and other additional feature sets.
Game potential
The Asus P7H55 motherboard has one interesting feature that enthusiasts discovered in the process of testing the device in dynamic resource-intensive games. When installing a processor based on Core i3 and an AMD Radeon HD 5-7 series video adapter, the motherboard automatically adapts to the resources of the installed components and fully reveals their potential in games. For comparison, the Core i7 processor only by a small margin exceeded the performance of its younger brother.
As the owners note in their reviews, this phenomenon occurs at the BIOS level. Judging by the statistics reflected in the testing programs, the intelligent system of the motherboard performs a controlled automatic overclock of the processor, memory and video card, forcing them to work at the same frequency. Definitely this action will lead to increased productivity.
Finally
As practice shows, to users of a budget class with a corresponding low cost, taking part in testing with more expensive motherboards, there should be no complaints from users. Yes, there are flaws in terms of compact placement of capacitors on the Asus P7H55 printed circuit board , but this is more an organizational issue, which does not have a special effect on performance.
But there are many advantages and all of them play an important role for the future owner when buying: the presence of all possible connectors, the presence of video outputs, digital sound, a gigabit network and the like interfaces that in the last few years began to disappear from devices of many other manufacturers.