H55 vs P55, does it really matter for most people?

[chocoboat]

I'm putting together a budget PC, for all kinds of everyday use plus some gaming. Here's the full build:

Antec Mini P180 case
Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H Micro ATX Motherboard
Antec Earthwatts 430W power supply
Intel Core i5-750
G.SKILL Ripjaws 4GB DDR3 1600
EVGA GTS 250 512MB
Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 500GB
Samsung DVDRW drive

I wanted a Core i5, and for the rest of it I just wanted the cheapest option out of the products with very positive reviews, so that's why I chose the Gigabyte H55 motherboard.

Recently I've been reading some things like "you want P55 for gaming" and "H55 is really just meant for the dual core i5s", which makes me wonder if I bought the wrong thing.

I'm aware the board only has two RAM slots (4GB is plenty for me right now, especially with RAM prices), and I have no interest in SLI.

Is this H55 board inferior to a P55 in other important ways that I don't know about? Is it good enough for my purposes, or could I somehow regret choosing it? I need an H55 faq or something... I see that it's "meant for" the dual core i5s, and that combining the two gives you onboard Intel HD graphics, but I can't see what the drawbacks are.

Any info would be much appreciated.

 

[shagrathdex666]

absolutely not you see the h55 as you say its for the I5 and dual core i5 it will support
every cpu out there on lga 1156, maybe if you are not planning to overclock the h55 will be more than enough for gaming since you are not planning on sli.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

H55 is for the integtated graphics on every ( I think ) i5 EXCEPT the i5 750.....the 750 does not have the onboard graphics.

The main difference between X58, P55 and H55 is the number of PCI Express lanes and the speed they run at.

As long as you only want to run 1 graphics card H55 should be fine for you but....the H55 was really designed for onboard graphics and every other i5 EXCEPT the i5 750 because they all have on chip graphics support.

This explains better http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/mainboard/i55h-57h-chipsets-p1.html

Hope that helps.

 

[rockyjohn]

Thanks for the link. I would like to point out that it states the P55 is more like the H57 (other than the number of PCIe lanes) whereas the H55 actually has fewer features in addition to even fewer PCIe lanes than the H57 (such as no RAID and fewer USB connections).

 

[Deleted member 217926]

I sent you a reply to the PM. Just letting you know as it is still unread and there were questions. I do not believe PMs send you emails to let you know when they are received.

 

[chocoboat]

Best answer selected by chocoboat.

 

[Guest]

The integrated raid on the P55/H57 chipsets is just crumby 'fake raid'. There's no proper raid controller on the system it's just a bit of software and a Windows driver tying it together.

Arguably you would be better just setting up software raid functionality with Windows 7 than using a consumer grade motherboard to create raid. For one if your board fails you won't be able to access data on a raid-0 without a replacement of the same board. Can't move your array to a new PC as the different software/driver will not recognise it.

If you really intend to use raid on a Windows PC either buy a proper controller card or use software raid built into OS.

Linux, don't even bother trying to use the fake raid.

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Iain Kay