all right so today I've got another h55 board this one is from ASUS and the
first thing that you can tell about it is that design matters this is a
replacement logo for the one that they have on their uh whatever it is Extreme
something or other that includes USB 3.0 whatever it's a similar looking logo and
basically what they're saying is that engineering is important which it is from other boards because if it's not
engineered well it won't work very well okay so this board also includes HDMI
DVI GPU boost DDR3 2133 support that's
pretty cool for like an microatx entry level board and turbo V it is Windows 7
ready it supports LGA 1156 socket CPUs
and that includes core i7 Core i5 and core I3 so there we go that pretty much
covers that here they've got a quick oh oh actually this is kind of neat okay so
instant igpu level Bo level up so they take the integrated GPU in real time and
boost it for the best graphics performance so if you actually care about the graphics performance of your
onboard CPU on the core I3 or core i5 dual core then this is how you will be
able to take advantage of it it also has a turbo key which allows for easy it's
an overclocking button okay all right okay well why don't we get this thing
open and we'll have a have a quick look at it so this is a pro board so it's not
one of their most basic uhoh I'm losing accessories here you know what give me
just like two seconds I'm going to go ahead and adjust my camera down so you
can see what I'm doing here you know what I might even use the zoom today
check that out so you will be able to see even better wow how about that okay
then I have accessories so inside we will find two SATA cables one straight
and one right angle then we will find one IDE cable now seriously personally I
would rather see another couple SATA cables because how many people are
really using IDE drives with a new build these days all right then we got an IO
Shield then we have a users guide which
also includes a DVD that has all your drivers and whatnot don't use any of
this download the latest office.com and you will be able to have a much better
experience out of the box with the latest drivers all right and then we
have the board itself in ASUS's eco-friendly allp paper packaging
there's no foam there's very little plastic actually so I'm going to go
ahead and no wrong way wrong way it's hard to operate a camera from like the
front of it it's uh not ideal all right
so I don't see any mention whatsoever on this board for Crossfire support to be
perfectly honest but I haven't actually checked to see if it does support it so
hopefully I'll figure it out at some point and make an annotation but let's
have a look at the general layout of the board so first of all you've got two PCI
slots one PCI Express 16 slot and one PCI E1 slot this is kind of my ideal
configuration for a Micro ATX board these days because really if you're
going to be using a single slot GPU even
if yeah even if you're using a single slot GPU you're going to want to leave the next slot open so it has some room
to breathe so this way you can use a pie PCI Express and a PCI and then you can
also use a video card in it if you want you've got a few USB 3 excuse me u3 USB
2.0 headers all right then you've got six SATA ports which is I I love that I
love how so how so many lower-end boards these days are coming with more SATA
ports you can also see that even though this looks like kind of a random layout
for them it's not random at all because here's your PCI Express Graphics slot
and here is the space that would be taken up by a dual slot GPU so they've
got it positioned so you can conveniently make use of these even if
you have a long graphics card installed you got an IDE port on the side here and
then you have your 24 pin power located in its ideal location along the right
hand Edge they've got their wow I can't believe they didn't call this out on the
box because I've seen it on every other box that has this they have their um
easy one-sided RAM install I don't I don't
remember what this is called but basically there's only a clip on the one
side the other side this side doesn't actually have Clips so you see they're
they're shaped kind of different so all you have to do is you you put the the
RAM module in this one and then you open up the clip put it in and then clip it
in on the one side so it's kind of different that way all right uh then
you've got your LGA 1156 socket which supports core I 3s Core i 5S and core I
7s now this is an h55 board so that
means you've got Onboard video including HDMI DVI and VGA but the bad news is
that the Onboard video is not on the motherboard it's not actually in the
chipset it's in the CPU so if you put in a CPU that doesn't have Onboard video
then it won't work so you have to use a core I3 dual core or a core i5 dual core
in order to take advantage of the Onboard video just something you ought to be aware of all right so then we've
got an eight pin power connector which is quite surprising to see on like like
I said sort of a it's kind of a hybrid like it's either either value or it's
highend it's kind of both okay they've got their cool Fortress of Solitude
style of mosfet cooling here I really like this I can't even I can't even
explain why and then on the back panel let's have a quick look here I mean I
know I kind of showed it to you but let's have a better look so you got a PS2 Port looks like it's keyboard only
but it might work with a mouse I have no idea normally those ones are colorcoded
green and purple then you've got six USB ports these are all USB 2.0 you've got
HDMI like I said won't work without the onard board GPU then you've got optical
audio out you got a couple more GPU outputs again they don't work without an
onboard GPU you've got gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio so thank you for checking
out my quick unboxing of the ASUS p7
h55m Pro