It’s finally ready: part 2 of our H55/H57 coverage. After battling it out with eight motherboards, we decide which ones we’d be happy to live with on a daily basis. If you missed part 1, we’ll take this opportunity to re-direct you.

The short recap is that we found a couple of good candidates in part 1, namely the ASRock H55M-Pro and the P7H55D-M Evo. The late January BIOS releases for both of these boards delivered good all round performance and functionality, with only a couple of things needing improvement or change. For ASUS, we felt their board was a touch too pricey at $134; ASUS have since dropped the MSRP of the H55 Evo $119. In a typical Newegg maneuver, the board retails at $124 with a shipping cost of $2.99, while boards from other vendors are shipped at MSRP + $7.87 with the same delivery deal—strange.

Meanwhile, ASRock managed to add a touch more overclocking headroom for 8GB memory configurations by adding support for Quick Path Interconnect multiplier changes, delivering a great all around performer at an asking price of $95. The other two boards from part one are the ASUS P7H57D-V Evo and the MSI H55M-ED55. ASUS’ H57 is simply too expensive at $200 in our opinion; we’d put $100 towards a discrete GPU rather than fork out the extra money for a full size ATX board offering SATA 6G at this stage (at least until SATA 6G peripherals are affordable). MSI’s H55M-ED55 hasn’t received a new BIOS since our last test (nor can we find it on sale in the States), and remains a little finicky to set up in comparison to boards from ASUS and Gigabyte.

Part two’s line-up consists of two very attractively priced boards from Gigabyte, the H55-USB3 and H57M-USB3 models coming in at ($110 and $119), together with ECS’s super cheap stock runner called the H55H-V1.0 ($80). Finally, we just about managed to squeeze BIOSTAR’s TH55XE ($115) into the fray after it arrived late in our labs this week. All of these boards have a head-start of sorts over the boards we tested in part 1, as they had an extra four weeks for vendors to get to grips with the H55/H57 chipsets and tackle some of the common issues that plague chipset launches. And it’s the subject of issues that leads us nicely into our summary section before we delve deeper into the workings of each board.

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