Introduction to the Asrock H55M Pro
I browse different forums to try and improve on what I already know. We can never learn too much. Often, I have come across one question, again and again. "What CPU should I buy?" The thread usually begins with what the person is using the PC for. Once I saw a person start such a thread and he was building the PC for general usage - not a gamer, graphic design or anything of that nature. He wanted something decent, while not spending his entire bank account. All of his needs could have easily be done with a dual core CPU. Yet, as always, there were people that try to convince individuals that they need a quad core to do basically nothing.
The first thing I thought was a new Intel Core i3 CPU would work perfectly. The low cost processor coupled with a new H55 chip set motherboard is the making of a pretty decent build. The new i3 speeds can top 3.46GHz in stock forum. For about $200 for board and processor, you can have something that will give the older socket quads a real run for their money. And with the iGPU on the CPU you don't have to worry about going out and spending well earned cash on a graphic cards. As much as 1759MB of graphic ram is more than enough to support the big screen television sitting in the living. Granted the only thing that will not change when building a new box based on the new Intel chip set is the price of the ram. Rather you are looking to for out all kinds on 6GB of ram for an i7 or 4GB on a i5/i3 the price will be about the same.
Let me get off the soapbox and get to the review. Asrock is known to make an affordable motherboards for the masses. As of late, they have been producing higher end motherboards that will give all the big boys like MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte a run for their money. What I like about Asrock now is that we don't have to wait for them to produce a motherboard on current chip sets. They are releasing them on launch, so that if you are on a budget, you don't have to wait to build.
The H55 is the newest thing to come from Intel. Not surprisingly, Asrock was right there to send out boards to all review sites. We have often seen this from the 'big' companies. The first of the boards released was the H55M Pro. As all H55 motherboards, the H55Pro-M is a micro ATX offering with dual 16x PCIe slots for Crossfire support, four DIMM slots and support for DDR3 2600. We definitely can't call Asrock a budget motherboard maker anymore. There are many more features the new board has to offer and we will discuss them as we look over it. Now,we really want to know how well it will overclock. We all want to get a little bit more out of the motherboard and processor to make it worth more for our money.
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