Asus P7P55-M review

The P7P55-M's price isn't low enough to justify its mediocre performance and features.
Written By K.G. Orphanides
Published on 9 September 2010

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Asus P7P55-M
Our rating
Reviewed price £81 inc VAT

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 doesnt make use of the LGA1156 processors built-in graphics capabilities – this means that if you want to use it in a media centre PC, youll have to buy a separate graphics card. This isnt the only oddity – theres a serial port on the back that we cant see most users requiring in their newly built PC. However, a total of eight back-panel USB ports are more than welcome. Theres also a FireWire port and a PS/2 connector, but no eSATA ports. Theres 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.

Asus P7P55-M
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 isnt the most well-rounded selection of ports and features weve ever seen, its capable enough, but the motherboards performance in our benchmark tests was disappointing. It got an overall score of just 126 – well below most of the other LGA1156 boards weve tested. If youre looking to spend around £80 on an Intel board there are many more capable alternatives, including our Best Buy winner, Asrocks P55 Pro/USB3.

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