Asus P7P55-M review

This microATX LGA1156 motherboard from Asus is compact, reasonably priced and has a decent array of ports and features, although it lacks the latest ports, such as USB3 and SATA III. Unusually for a microATX board, it doesn’t make use of the LGA1156 processors’ built-in graphics capabilities – this means that if you want to use it in a media centre PC, you’ll have to buy a separate graphics card.

This isn’t the only oddity – there’s a serial port on the back that we can’t see most users requiring in their newly built PC. However, a total of eight back-panel USB ports are more than welcome. There’s also a FireWire port and a PS/2 connector, but no eSATA ports. There’s no digital audio output, either – another strike against the board, as far as media centre builders are concerned – but six stereo connectors can output 7.1 analogue audio.

The P7P55-M’s four memory slots are capable of handling up to 16GB of overclocked PC3-17600 RAM. A PCI slot and two PCI-E x1 slots should be enough for internal expansion cards, while the PCI-E x16 slot will be needed by your graphics card. Like most compact motherboards, a dual-height graphics card will block access to the PCI-E x1 slot below. There are six SATA ports and an IDE connector for older PATA hard disks. Available headers include three USB, one S/PDIF and one parallel.

Although this isn’t the most well-rounded selection of ports and features we’ve ever seen, it’s capable enough, but the motherboard’s performance in our benchmark tests was disappointing. It got an overall score of just 126 – well below most of the other LGA1156 boards we’ve tested. If you’re looking to spend around £80 on an Intel board there are many more capable alternatives, including our Best Buy winner, Asrock’s P55 Pro/USB3.