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Asus’ P7H57D-V Evo is an expensive motherboard at just under £150, but you do get a lot for your money. It supports all the latest standards with two USB3 ports and two SATA III connectors. USB3 external hard disks are expensive, but are at least three times as fast as their USB2 counterparts, making these ports worth having. SATA III is less impressive. In our tests, a SATA III internal hard disk was no faster than the quickest SATA II disk. The SATA III controller chip used here doesn’t support RAID either, further limiting its usefulness. If you’re not yet ready to invest in the latest storage devices, there are six SATA II ports for accommodating existing internal hard disks and optical drives too. Unlike the SATA III controller, the SATA II chip does support RAID. For external storage and other peripherals, there are four USB ports and four headers, an eSATA port and even a FireWire 400 port and header. There are also plenty of ports for fitting internal peripherals such as sound cards and TV tuners. There are three PCI Express x1 slots and two PCI slots. There’s also a pair of graphics card slots with support for both SLI and CrossFireX, which links either two ATI or two Nvidia graphics cards together to increase 3D performance over a single card. It’s generally more cost-effective to buy a single, powerful graphics card.
Asus’ P7H57D-V Evo is expensive, but it is overflowing with features. Some are more useful than others, but if you want to build a LGA1156 PC with plenty of slots and USB3 and money is no object, this is the motherboard to buy.
