Asus P7H55-M Pro - Design
In terms of design the P7H55-M Pro is certainly not the most carefully thought-out motherboard that Asus has ever churned out, but for the most part it works rather well. Some quirky design aspects on this board see the SATA ports split up and the majority of them jammed behind the DIMM slots.
Asus made this less of an issue by including clips only at one end of the DIMM slots opposite to the SATA ports. The DIMM slots are also well clear of the PCIe x16 port and the majority of the SATA ports will fit behind long graphics cards.
Asus was quite clever placing the single PCIe x1 slot behind the PCIe x16 slot rather than in front of it. This means that those using a dual slot graphics card such as the Radeon HD 5770 still have the option of using the single PCIe x1 slot. Below the PCIe x16 is a pair of old PCI slots for legacy devices.
The P7H55-M Pro features a basic 4+2 power phase design which is common among Intel H55 motherboards. Interestingly, only nine out of the twelve MOSFETs used to deliver power to the processor are cooled by the long rectangular passive heatsink you see running alongside the LGA1156 processor socket. This suggests the heatsink is more or less here just to look pretty – and as far as heatsinks go we guess it is quite pretty.
Another heatsink that is actually required can be found on top of the Intel H55 chipset itself measuring just 4 cm x 4 cm and 1cm tall. This tiny passive heatsink is just big enough to keep the chip cool.
Things look very standard at the I/O panel as there is nothing here that cannot be found on your typical H55 motherboard. The connections include a single PS/2 port, 6 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA, DVI, S/PDIF output, 6 audio jacks and a single Ethernet port. These should provide more than enough connectivity for the average user.