ASUS P7H55-M Pro Core i3 & i5 H55 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,268 words · ~6 min read
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all right so today I've got another h55 board this one is from ASUS and the
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first thing that you can tell about it is that design matters this is a
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replacement logo for the one that they have on their uh whatever it is Extreme
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something or other that includes USB 3.0 whatever it's a similar looking logo and
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basically what they're saying is that engineering is important which it is from other boards because if it's not
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engineered well it won't work very well okay so this board also includes HDMI
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DVI GPU boost DDR3 2133 support that's
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pretty cool for like an microatx entry level board and turbo V it is Windows 7
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ready it supports LGA 1156 socket CPUs
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and that includes core i7 Core i5 and core I3 so there we go that pretty much
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covers that here they've got a quick oh oh actually this is kind of neat okay so
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instant igpu level Bo level up so they take the integrated GPU in real time and
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boost it for the best graphics performance so if you actually care about the graphics performance of your
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onboard CPU on the core I3 or core i5 dual core then this is how you will be
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able to take advantage of it it also has a turbo key which allows for easy it's
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an overclocking button okay all right okay well why don't we get this thing
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open and we'll have a have a quick look at it so this is a pro board so it's not
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one of their most basic uhoh I'm losing accessories here you know what give me
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just like two seconds I'm going to go ahead and adjust my camera down so you
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can see what I'm doing here you know what I might even use the zoom today
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check that out so you will be able to see even better wow how about that okay
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then I have accessories so inside we will find two SATA cables one straight
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and one right angle then we will find one IDE cable now seriously personally I
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would rather see another couple SATA cables because how many people are
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really using IDE drives with a new build these days all right then we got an IO
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Shield then we have a users guide which
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also includes a DVD that has all your drivers and whatnot don't use any of
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this download the latest office.com and you will be able to have a much better
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experience out of the box with the latest drivers all right and then we
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have the board itself in ASUS's eco-friendly allp paper packaging
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there's no foam there's very little plastic actually so I'm going to go
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ahead and no wrong way wrong way it's hard to operate a camera from like the
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front of it it's uh not ideal all right
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so I don't see any mention whatsoever on this board for Crossfire support to be
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perfectly honest but I haven't actually checked to see if it does support it so
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hopefully I'll figure it out at some point and make an annotation but let's
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have a look at the general layout of the board so first of all you've got two PCI
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slots one PCI Express 16 slot and one PCI E1 slot this is kind of my ideal
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configuration for a Micro ATX board these days because really if you're
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going to be using a single slot GPU even
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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
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to breathe so this way you can use a pie PCI Express and a PCI and then you can
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also use a video card in it if you want you've got a few USB 3 excuse me u3 USB
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2.0 headers all right then you've got six SATA ports which is I I love that I
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love how so how so many lower-end boards these days are coming with more SATA
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ports you can also see that even though this looks like kind of a random layout
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for them it's not random at all because here's your PCI Express Graphics slot
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and here is the space that would be taken up by a dual slot GPU so they've
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got it positioned so you can conveniently make use of these even if
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you have a long graphics card installed you got an IDE port on the side here and
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then you have your 24 pin power located in its ideal location along the right
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hand Edge they've got their wow I can't believe they didn't call this out on the
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box because I've seen it on every other box that has this they have their um
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easy one-sided RAM install I don't I don't
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remember what this is called but basically there's only a clip on the one
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side the other side this side doesn't actually have Clips so you see they're
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they're shaped kind of different so all you have to do is you you put the the
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RAM module in this one and then you open up the clip put it in and then clip it
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in on the one side so it's kind of different that way all right uh then
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you've got your LGA 1156 socket which supports core I 3s Core i 5S and core I
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7s now this is an h55 board so that
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means you've got Onboard video including HDMI DVI and VGA but the bad news is
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that the Onboard video is not on the motherboard it's not actually in the
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chipset it's in the CPU so if you put in a CPU that doesn't have Onboard video
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then it won't work so you have to use a core I3 dual core or a core i5 dual core
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in order to take advantage of the Onboard video just something you ought to be aware of all right so then we've
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got an eight pin power connector which is quite surprising to see on like like
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I said sort of a it's kind of a hybrid like it's either either value or it's
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highend it's kind of both okay they've got their cool Fortress of Solitude
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style of mosfet cooling here I really like this I can't even I can't even
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explain why and then on the back panel let's have a quick look here I mean I
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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
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but it might work with a mouse I have no idea normally those ones are colorcoded
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green and purple then you've got six USB ports these are all USB 2.0 you've got
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HDMI like I said won't work without the onard board GPU then you've got optical
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audio out you got a couple more GPU outputs again they don't work without an
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onboard GPU you've got gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio so thank you for checking
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out my quick unboxing of the ASUS p7
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h55m Pro