ASRock H55M Pro

4-Way Intel H55 Motherboard Shootout

The Asrock H55M Pro is around $10 - $20 cheaper than the Asus and Gigabyte motherboards featured in this article. At just $90 you would expect a rather bland product with no additional features other than those provided by the chipset. Fortunately, you would be wrong as the H55M Pro actually appears better equipped than the Asus P7H55-M Pro. That's not to say a lot has been added to this motherboard but Asrock did include Firewire and eSATA support, neither of which can be found on the P7H55-M Pro. At the same time there are a few features that cannot be found on the Asrock H55M Pro but are available on other H55 motherboards. Legacy hardware such as PATA devices and floppy disks are not supported by this motherboard, for example. This is obviously not a big deal as anyone who is migrating to the LGA1156 platform will be undergoing an entire system build, and therefore supporting these age old technologies is not really necessary, especially with today's storage prices. The only other thing you will miss out on with the Asrock H55M Pro is one USB 2.0 port. Rather than offering the full 12 range, Asrock has provided just 11 ports to avoid having to redesign the I/O panel.