Asus P7P55-M review

Gallery

Verdict:

The P7P55-M's price isn't low enough to justify its mediocre performance and features.

Review Date: 9 Sep 2010

Price when reviewed: £81

Buy it now for: £97
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

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.

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