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Asrock P55 Pro/USB3 review

Asrock P55 Pro/USB3
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £82
inc VAT

Loads of features and blistering performance make this our first choice for an LGA1156 motherboard, despite its lack of integrated graphics support.

Specifications

LGA1156, ATX, Intel P55 chipset, supports: Core i3, Core i5, Core i7

http://www.ilgs.co.uk

Asrock’s P55 Pro/USB3 motherboard costs just £82 but it has a range of features we’d expect to see on far more expensive boards, including USB3, support for 2,600MHz overclocked RAM, on-board power and reset buttons and an easy overclocking interface in the BIOS. It doesn’t support SATA III, but this isn’t a major sacrifice.

There are two PCI-E x16 slots, but the meagre performance gains by installing two cards means you may as well use the second slot for regular expansion cards. The well thought-out design means that there’s enough room to install a double-height graphics card without blocking any other slots (two PCI-E x1 and two PCI), although anything in the PCI-E x1 slot below will be right up against your graphics card’s fan.

Asrock P55 Pro/USB3

The back panel has a generous array of seven USB ports but just one USB3 port for super-fast external storage. There are two PS/2 ports, so you don’t necessarily have to use up any of your USB connections for your mouse and keyboard. There’s also an eSATA port, the usual six analogue stereo outputs for surround sound audio from the onboard Realtek audio processor, plus both optical and co-axial S/PDIF outputs and a Clear CMOS button that makes it easy to recover from overclocking errors.

There are further three onboard USB headers, several SATA connectors, one IDE connector, a floppy connector, plus serial and infrared receiver connectors. There’s also “Dr. Debug”, an LCD display that displays post codes and makes it easier to diagnose errors at boot.

Unlike many LGA1156 motherboards, the P55 Pro/USB3 doesn’t support the integrated graphics processing capabilities of Intel’s latest processors. There’s also no FireWire support, but this motherboard does almost everything else and its overall benchmark score of 138 is among the best we’ve ever seen. It’s our Best Buy.

Basic Specifications

Rating *****
Processor socket LGA1156
Form factor ATX
Size 305x218mm
Processor support Core i3, Core i5, Core i7
Processor external bus 133MHz (2.0GB/s Direct Media Interface)
Chipset north bridge Intel P55
Chipset south bridge Intel P55
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics No
Supported memory type DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1866/2133/2600+
Maximum memory speed PC3-17000
Memory slots 4
Maximum memory 16GB
Dual-channel support yes

Buying Information

Price £82
Supplier http://www.ilgs.co.uk
Details www.asrock.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots 2
Dual graphics architecture CrossFireX
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 2
PCI slots 2
Fan headers 3
Floppy ports 1
IDE ports 1
Serial ATA ports 7
RAID chipset (max disks) Intel Express P55 (7x SATAII, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD)

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realtek ALC892 (6x analogue out, optical S/PDIF)
USB2 ports / headers 8/3
Firewire ports / headers 0/0
Legacy ports 2x PS/2, serial header
Other ports 1x eSATA, 1x USB3
Cables included 4x SATA
Brackets included none
Software included drivers, CyberLink DVD Suite, Creative X-Fi MB

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/RAM/chipset
CPU clock max adjustment 300MHz

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