Asrock P55 Pro/USB3 review

Asrock’s P55 Pro/USB3 motherboard costs just £82 but it has a range of features we’d expect to see on far more expensive boards, including USB3, support for 2,600MHz overclocked RAM, on-board power and reset buttons and an easy overclocking interface in the BIOS. It doesn’t support SATA III, but this isn’t a major sacrifice.

There are two PCI-E x16 slots, but the meagre performance gains by installing two cards means you may as well use the second slot for regular expansion cards. The well thought-out design means that there’s enough room to install a double-height graphics card without blocking any other slots (two PCI-E x1 and two PCI), although anything in the PCI-E x1 slot below will be right up against your graphics card’s fan.

The back panel has a generous array of seven USB ports but just one USB3 port for super-fast external storage. There are two PS/2 ports, so you don’t necessarily have to use up any of your USB connections for your mouse and keyboard. There’s also an eSATA port, the usual six analogue stereo outputs for surround sound audio from the onboard Realtek audio processor, plus both optical and co-axial S/PDIF outputs and a Clear CMOS button that makes it easy to recover from overclocking errors.

There are further three onboard USB headers, several SATA connectors, one IDE connector, a floppy connector, plus serial and infrared receiver connectors. There’s also “Dr. Debug”, an LCD display that displays post codes and makes it easier to diagnose errors at boot.

Unlike many LGA1156 motherboards, the P55 Pro/USB3 doesn’t support the integrated graphics processing capabilities of Intel’s latest processors. There’s also no FireWire support, but this motherboard does almost everything else and its overall benchmark score of 138 is among the best we’ve ever seen. It’s our Best Buy.