Review: Asus P7H55-M

The release of Intel's Clarkdale chip and its accompanying H55 chipset means new boards all round for Intel's LGA1156 boys. The shiny new P7H55-M from ASUS aims to offer a full-blooded experience at little more than budget price and comes with a raft of overclocking tools to keep the most dedicated explorer of performance tweaks happy. It has the neat ability to adjust its base clock in 1MHz increments, and you've got a Marvell SATA controller running two internal SATA 600 ports, and two external USB 3.0 ports, so you're tooled-up for fast drives. The feature list is full of Asus' unique features; some lovely, some fairly pointless (does anybody on earth use Express Gate?). The two Asus is most pleased about are the new green-friendly Energy Processor Unit, which does clever things to voltage and multipliers across the whole board, and Turbo Unlocker ? press a button and get an instant boost with unlocked chips (they tell us).We tested the P7H55-M with an Intel i7-870, a meaty Radeon graphics card and two sticks of Corsair memory running at 1,333MHz (although it isn't, true memory speed is arcane knowledge). Here we've pitched the new bug against a Gigabtye H55M-UD2H ? not quite as feature-rich perhaps, but using the same Intel chipset and aimed at the same buyer and sells for about the same, too. Both boards were run without any overclocking (not as easy as it sounds; they were quite keen). As you might expect, it's a close-run thing. The Asus has a slim but clear lead in the application benchmarks. Why the memory bandwidths differ is a bit of a mystery. An erroneous timing setting perhaps?CPU rendering Cinebench R10 ? time in seconds, lower is betterAsus P7H55-M: 47Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 52Cinebench R11 ? index, higher is betterAsus P7H55-M: 5.52Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 5.13Video encodingX264 V.2 ? frames per second, higher is betterAsus P7H55-M: 28.57Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 27.84Game physicsWorld in Conflict ? frames per second, higher is betterAsus P7H55-M: 239Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 238Memory speedSiSoft Sandra ? data transfer rate, higher is betterAsus P7H55-M: 16.1GB/sGigabtye H55M-UD2H: 16.7GB/sWe were looking forward to seeing just how the P7H55-M could stretch Intel's marvellously stretchy i7. The automated overclocking features proved to be damp squibs. The OC Tuner in the BIOS turned our 2.93GHz chip into a 3.88GHz one, which was a good start. Unfortunately, it did it by dropping the clock multiplier to 20 and pushing the base clock to 194MHz, which was too much for the rest of the system to cope with and stay stable. It booted, but benchmarking revealed that the processor throttled back under the stress. The software-based TurboV auto-tuner wasn't any better. This left the multiplier alone and pushed the base clock from 133MHz to ? wait for it ? 136MHz. We were unimpressed.Back to the old fashioned way and into the BIOS we went, loaded the defaults and set controls to manual. At an x24 multiplier and a 155MHz base clock, we had a stable 3.72Ghz system. For the more dedicated speed merchant there was more to come, adjusting the voltages and tweaking the memory timings and so forth. There are many adjustable settings, clock skew, differential amplitude, individual memory timings and more that might require some form of electrical engineering knowledge to use with confidence. The Turbo Unlocker feature, when you've set it all up, should give a boost to CPU performance when you hit the hotkey. We remain unconvinced here. If it will overclock without tears, then why not leave it overclocked?Motherboards have caught the fashion for 'green' features. The P7H55-M boasts an EPU, Energy Processing Unit, this will adjust the core voltage, the FSB, clock multiplier, spin down drives and more. It's something Asus appears particularly pleased about, and it's clever stuff. This new-found righteousness is even accompanied by a little counter which tells you how many mg of CO2 you've avoided emitting. Saving power is good, of course, however, Cinebench R10's score was crippled, rising from 47 seconds to over 80 seconds running maximum power saving mode, which is rather against the whole point of building a fast PC. It's nice but you would do better green work using sleep and low power modes rather than leaving it to EPU to run at reduced ability. There is also something deliciously ironic about watching your CO2 saved meter running. What else? Well there's a wonderfully bullet-proof BIOS, it'll recover from any stupid mistakes you might make (ahem) and you can switch between multiple BIOS set-ups. We likedAt this price its hard to get too fussy about the P7H55-M, it covers all the bases rather well. It has the all-important high-speed controllers, although an external SATA port is notable by its absence. As an over-clocking board it has plenty of potential, too: there's support for 2,000MHz memory and that incremental base clock adjustment is hours of fun. We dislikedThe auto-tuning needs some work though. The small form factor means only one x16 PCIe slot, so no dual-card action, so this isn't the board for that ultimate games monster you always promised yourself. 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