Asus P7H57D-V Evo Motherboard Review

Asus P7H57D-V Evo

Manufacturer: Asus
UK Price (as Reviewed): £145.98 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as Reviewed): $199.99 (ex. Tax)

Asus' current style of P55 motherboards have gone down well with PC builders worldwide, with sharp looks and reliable performance. While we've generally had a very good impression of the range to date, each board has had little niggles that have drawn then away from excellence. When we looked at the sub-£100 P7P55D-LE and P7P55-M in CustomPC issue 77, they were good but each lacked in different areas compared to the excellent Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2.

With that in mind, we hope Asus has tied up a few loose ends with its latest 'performance-mainstream' H57 board, the P7H57D-V Evo, that features the same design as the P55s, but has the benefit of a new chipset and a few months extra tweakage by Asus engineers.

Board Features

• Support for Intel Pentium, Core i3, i5 and Core i7 LGA1156 CPUs
  
• Intel H57 PCH
  
• Four 1.5V DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 16GB of memory up to "2,133MHz (OC)" and Intel XMP technology
  
• One Gigabit Ethernet controller from Realtek 8112L
  
• Two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots providing either one x16 or two x8 links for Nvidia SLI and ATI CrossFire technology (Intel Lynnfield CPUs only)
  
• One PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slot (5GT/s)
  
• One PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slot (2.5GT/s)
  
• Two PCI slots
  
• Six SATA 3Gbps ports supporting Intel Matrix RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD from Intel H57
  
• One IDE port supporting two devices and one eSATA 3Gbps from Marvell 88SE6111
  
• One Marvell® SATA 6Gb/s controller, supporting two ports
  
• NEC USB 3.0 controller - two ports on rear I/O
  
• 12 USB 2.0 ports - eight on rear I/O, four via pin-outs
  
• VIA 6308P IEEE1394a Firewire supporting two ports - one via pin-outs, one on the rear I/O
  
• Realtek ALC889 8-Channel High Definition Audio codec supporting Blu-ray protected audio path

In the box we get a few SATA cables - some of which have 90 degree connectors - and a PCI bracket that offers eSATA and a few more USB ports. There's also an SLI bracket, IDE cable, the Asus Q-Shield (a rear I/O shield with foam on the back) and the usual manual and driver discs too.