P55 or H55: which would you choose?

[perdomot]

Been thinking of experimenting with an intel rig and was interested in getting a good mobo to pair with an i5-750. Got a good vid card so onboard vid is unnecessary but I do want usb 3 so I'm trying to figure out which would be the best option. The H55 boards are less expensive but are the P55 are better choice overall? They do have the new SATA 6Gb ports but I want the best chance for OCing the 750 cpu. Thanks

 

[adamantinepiggy]

Been thinking of experimenting with an intel rig and was interested in getting a good mobo to pair with an i5-750. Got a good vid card so onboard vid is unnecessary but I do want usb 3 so I'm trying to figure out which would be the best option. The H55 boards are less expensive but are the P55 are better choice overall? They do have the new SATA 6Gb ports but I want the best chance for OCing the 750 cpu. Thanks

Main diff is on-board video capability with H55 (depending on CPU) and RAID with P55. You are going with the i5-750 which is a quad-core. Guess what though.. Quad-core does not have the video circuitry the dual-cores do. Thusly, although the CPU will work in a H55 MB, the on-board video won't. Since you are choosing that particular CPU, it would be better to go with the P55 MB so you at least have the option of Intel's RAID versus having no option to enable video in a H55.

As to overclocking, I have not pushed my H55 or P55 systems hard, but they seem roughly equivilent with the nod towards the P55. P55's come with better motherboards (re: more expensive) in general though over H55's, so that probably increase the OC abilities more than differences in the chipsets. H55 was meant more for all-in-one-do-everything cheap PC's

As to USB3, there's numerous add-on cards you can use so while having it on the MB is nice, it's not earth shattering if you don't.

As to SATA3, there are NO MB-integrated SATA controller chips that perform "all-around" as well as Intel's at SATA2 speeds. Yes you can have some rediculous read speeds with the right SSD connected to a SATA3 port, but every other function will not perform as well as on the Intel SATA2 controller. You benchmark on 3rd party SATA2 ports, you do real work on the Intel SATA2 ports.

 

[perdomot]

Thanks for the feedback. I figured the P55 would be a better choice for me given my needs. Thanks again.