Teensy-tiny-itty-bitty motherboard from Asrock.
ASRock isone of those companies that manages time and time again to take a product and sell it for a price that no-one really anticipated - and its P55M PRO has done just that. It's a P55 Express mATX mobo that rocks up at a price of only $135, and no matter how you slice it that makes this board one of the cheapest options out there right now. There has been a lot cut from this obviously bargain board, but what's missing is both good and bad.
Perhaps the most obvious omission are heatsinks for the power delivery; typically an analogue delivery method around the CPU socket, this is instead replaced by a digital PWM that actually performed pretty well under use, matching the voltage to the BIOS setting admirably while only becoming slightly warm under load. The upside of this lack of heatsinks is a huge amount of space around the LGA1156 socket, meaning that any heatsink will fit here (and there are even LGA775 mounting holes for those upgrading on the cheap). There's a row of solid capacitors that are placed just a touch too close to the back of the socket that can sometimes interfere with it opening smoothly. Overzealous builders might pop one off the mobo, but it should be fine if careful attention is given.
Four DDR3 slots lie in the usual place, and mobo power sockets are where you'd expect them to be. Even though the mobo is in a micro ATX form factor there is still an IDE and floppy socket available, but annoyingly only four vertical SATA ports are here. This is understandable considering the budget skew of the mobo, but we'd prefer to see all six SATA ports from the P55 chip available for internal devices. A tiny little heatsink sits on the P55 chip itself, and thanks to it having the same volume of metal as a tooth filling it became pretty hot under use.
All the onboard headers you'd expect are placed in the bottom-right corner of the board, giving some more USB ports and the usual case connectivity. There are a total of three fan headers on the board, one at the bottom and two at the top, pretty decent for a budget board. The expansion slot area is well thought out, providing capacity for incredibly overkill dual graphics setups or the use of older PCI devices. While the two PCIe x16 lanes are physically full the second is electrically limited to 4x bandwidth only, due to the removal of the Packet Switch chips that are usually present. Crossfire and SLI aren't exactly something you'd consider on a budget board like this, so it's not too unforgivable.
The rear I/O panel gives plenty of expansion options with PS2, Optical/Coaxial, six USB, 6-pin Firewire, Ethernet, two hybrid eSATA/USB and 7.1 channel audio. Both of the eSATA connectors were routed from the P55 chip, though eSATA isn't exactly a must-have feature on a board like this. What is a must, at least for Atomicans, is overclockability. Heading into the relatively bare but accessible BIOS and tweaking with the voltages a little gave a surprising maximum speed of 4114MHz (187 x 22, 1.4V). This isn't the maximum speed the chip can reach, but considering the voltage options were pretty restrictive it is better than we had expected.
Unfortunately when looking at the mobo as a whole it might be a pretty decent option if you're looking to jump into Core i5 on an extreme budget, but the bundle is pathetic and the longevity of the board is dubious due to heat issues.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012