Motherboard Asus P7H55: specifications, reviews

In this article, the reader will get acquainted with the motherboard Asus P7H55, designed to install processors manufactured by Intel. The review of this product will be of interest to those customers who wish to purchase a gaming segment device in a budget class. Technical characteristics, reviews and recommendations of experts will help users to make a choice before buying.

Assortment of interfaces in the motherboard Asus P7H55

This motherboard, in contrast to analogues in the computer market, has one important feature - the presence of all necessary interfaces and connectors for connecting peripherals. The truth is very much confusing for many owners of the motherboard form factor. After all, a heap of connectors on the mATX board creates inconvenience when connecting devices.

Along with a large assortment of interfaces, the Asus P7H55 is provided on the market at a decent price (up to 5000 rubles). It's true that in the walls of Asus the technologists took a small step back and installed conventional capacitors instead of standard solid-state drives. Also, on the motherboard, the owner can discover a number of controllers that do not have the Asus branded marking.

First meeting

The fact that the motherboard Asus P7H55 belongs to the budget class, says not only its cost, but also the bundle. In addition to the main unit, in the box the owner will find a brief instruction manual, driver discs, a rear panel plug and two cables: SATA and ATA. In the feedback of users a lot of negativity to the manufacturer regarding the inability to connect several SATA disks to the system - you need to buy interface cables in the store, which is quite inconvenient.

There are questions to the manufacturer and concerning the adapters for connecting the components to the power supply of the system. However, as experts say, this issue should fall on the shoulders of the power unit manufacturers. After all, according to the world standard, all necessary connectors must be on the power supply unit.

Why compactness and cheaper?

As the owners assure the media, the motherboard Asus P7H55 is not designed to increase performance by overclocking. The whole problem is the available space for installing a powerful cooler on the processor. Constructed in several rows of capacitors along the perimeter of the processor socket will not allow the installation of a powerful cooling system.

The pursuit of compactness has led to the fact that the user may have problems installing branded RAM modules that have gratings for cooling on the side faces. The same high capacitors placed close to the DDR3 connectors do not allow the memory modules to be inserted into the slot. Benefit capacitors block access to the interface from only one side. The presence of 4 receivers for memory modules can partially solve the problem with the installation of non-standard laths.

Expansion cards and video controllers

Owners of Asus P7H55, who have PCI devices for connecting (TV tuner, sound adapter or network card), with the purchase of more than lucky ones. After all, the manufacturer, in addition to the standard PCIex16 interface, provided its product with two PCI interfaces and one PCIex1 port. The motherboard is equipped with video output connectors (analog VGA interface and digital DVI outlets with HDMI). The truth for video output will require a processor with an integrated video core.

In terms of connecting hard drives, users also will not have problems. The motherboard provides 6 corresponding SATA connectors. In addition, they are placed quite compactly, near the basket for installing disks. Owners of old optical drives with IDE interface will be delighted. There is an appropriate connector on the board.

System Board Specifications

The motherboard is built on the Intel H55 chipset and is designed to install all Intel Core i7 / i5 / i3 processors, as well as Pentium processors, which are installed on the LGA 1156 socket. For the installation of RAM, there are four DDR3 interface connectors that support the operation of the modules on Frequencies of 1066-2200 MHz. The maximum supported memory is 16 GB. The interface for connecting hard drives works according to the SATAIII standard, but the creation of arrays at the hardware level does not support.

As you can see from the review, for the motherboard Asus P7H55 the technical characteristics look pretty attractive, although they have a number of limitations. But as practice shows, the same RAID array uses only a few users per million customers. All owners are more interested in bandwidth and stability, which the motherboard can demonstrate in games and work with resource-intensive applications.

A decent BIOS system

But at first glance, an unremarkable BIOS, which does not have a built-in graphics shell, clearly hints to the owner that for the Asus P7H55 motherboard, overclocking is the basic functionality. Settings and power management are possible for both the processor and RAM with a video adapter. And do not think that the user is only given the choice of actions from the recommended list. There are also settings with data input manually, as it is implemented on gaming motherboards.

The only drawback, which complains to all owners of this motherboard in their reviews, is a language pack that is equipped with a BIOS. The manufacturer provided it with six popular languages, among which there is no Russian. And if you take into account that the operating manual is written in English, many users may have problems when setting up the system.

Drivers and software

Owners of the motherboard Asus P7H55 to install drivers and all the necessary software for overclocking the platform do not need to sit for hours on the Internet, selecting the necessary utilities. The company Asus in this issue ahead of all its competitors, collecting together the entire required set on one disk. All utilities and drivers have a convenient multimedia shell, which in a few minutes will install the user's software on the computer.

As a tool for overclocking the processor and memory by changing the voltage on the motherboard, the manufacturer chose TurboV EVO. The fact is that this is the only stably working product that can overclock the built-in graphics core on Intel processors. True, many owners, judging by their feedback, believe that all operations with increasing frequency need to be done in the BIOS (less time is spent on checking the stability after rebooting the computer).

Testing and overclocking

The performance of the motherboard Asus P7H55 M, whose characteristics are more dependent on the processor, memory and video card, is difficult to measure. Therefore, many test labs focus not on performance, but on the stability of the system in overclocking (voltage constancy, heating, no failures and failures at maximum loads). That's where a representative of the budget class was able to surprise all users who wanted to test this motherboard and compare it with the more expensive representatives of the computer market.

Autumn high stability and productivity in operation is guaranteed by the introduction of some innovations from the manufacturer Asus. This is a 6-phase system for powering the processor, proprietary technologies for BIOS protection, intelligent control overclocking and cooling system and other additional feature sets.

Gaming potential

In the motherboard Asus P7H55 there is one interesting feature that enthusiasts have discovered in the process of testing the device in dynamic resource-intensive games. When installing a processor based on Core i3 and AMD Radeon HD 5-7 series graphics adapter, the motherboard automatically adapts to the resources of the installed components and fully reveals their potential in games. For comparison, the Core i7 processor only surpassed the performance of a younger brother with a small margin.

As the owners note in their reviews, this phenomenon occurs at the BIOS level. Judging by the statistics reflected in the testing programs, the intelligent system of the motherboard produces a controlled automatic overclocking of the processor, memory and video card, causing them to operate at the same frequency. Unambiguously, this action will lead to increased productivity.

Finally

As practice shows, to the devices of a budget class with a corresponding low cost, taking part in testing with more expensive motherboards, there should be no claims from users. Yes, there are flaws in terms of the compact placement of capacitors on the Asus P7H55 PCB , but this is more of an organizational issue, which does not have much impact on performance.

But there are a lot of advantages and they all play an important role for the future owner when buying: the presence of all possible connectors, the presence of video outputs, digital sound, a gigabit network and similar interfaces that in the past few years began to disappear from the devices of many other manufacturers.