Right now there are a number of good quality affordable options for budget users looking to build a new computer. The AMD Phenom II X2 processor series for example is phenomenal value, with the 3.2GHz flagship part priced at just $100 US. Combine this with the affordable AMD 785G motherboards at around just $70 US and you have the makings of a seriously good value platform.

However if you are willing to part with a little more cash, then the new Intel Core i3 series might be the way to go. Recently we conducted some CPU scaling tests with a pair of Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire graphics cards and were amazed by the results. The unassuming Core i3 series was in many cases able to deliver comparable gaming performance to its much bigger brother the Core i7.

This is made all the more remarkable given the fact that the most expensive Core i3 processor is still half the price of the cheapest Core i7 processor. When compared to the Phenom II X2 555, consumers will pay about $20-$30 more for a Core i3 530 processor, while the Intel H55 motherboards are on average $20-$30 more as well.

Still, there are a number of very impressive Intel H55 motherboards available at reasonable prices. Both Asus and Gigabyte have been very competitive with their H55 products, pricing them quite aggressively. The Asus P7H55-M Pro for example costs just $110 US, while the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H is slightly cheaper at $105 US.

Despite their affordable price tags there is nothing cheap about either of these products and in fact they both appear quite high-end. In terms of features both boards are very well equipped, though there are a few aspects that vary quite differently, and with almost no difference in price we have set out to determine which company is providing consumers with the best offer.

While all Intel H55 motherboards do support Gigabit LAN and HD Audio, their implementation will vary. Asus has gone with the Realtek RTL8112L controller in order to provide Gigabit LAN support and this is a controller they generally feature on their cheaper low-end motherboards.

Providing the 8-Channel HD Audio support is another Realtek chip, this time the ALC889 has been used, which supports 16/20/24-bit SPDIF input and output with up to 192kHz sample rate. This is one of the more impressive Realtek HD Codecs and it is an excellent addition to the P7H55-M Pro.

Asus has included another third-party controller, though this is a far less exciting addition. The JMicron JMB368 has been included, which is a single port PATA controller that uses a single PCI Express lane. This feature does allow the P7H55-M Pro to support older PATA drives, though it is not a feature that we feel is necessary to provide on modern motherboards. That said, being an affordable low-end product, this feature could potential save some consumers a small amount of money.

Other than these three controllers, Asus has not done anything to make the P7H55-M Pro more feature rich than your typical Intel H55 motherboard. They have provided the ability to utilize all twelve USB 2.0 ports, though out of the box it is only possible to use half of these ports, meaning that additional USB headers must be purchased to use the other six.

Still, having said that, Asus has designed the DIMM slots so that there are only clips at one end of the slots and those clips are at the opposite end to the SATA ports, making this less of an issue. The DIMM slots are also well clear of the PCI Express x16 port and the majority of the SATA ports will fit behind long graphics cards.

Asus has been quite clever by placing the single PCIe x1 slot behind the PCIe x16 slot rather than in front of it. This means that those using a dual slot graphics card, such as the Radeon HD 5770, still have the option of using the single PCIe x1 slot. Below the PCIe x16 slot is a pair of old PCI slots for legacy devices.

The P7H55-M Pro features a basic 4+2 power phase design which is common among Intel H55 motherboards. Interestingly, not all the MOSFETs are cooled by the long rectangular passive heatsink that you will see running alongside the LGA1156 processor socket.

Just 9 of the 12 MOSFETs used to deliver power to the processor feature cooling, which suggests that this heatsink is more or less just here to look pretty, and as far as heatsinks go we guess it is quite pretty. Another heatsink that is actually required can be found on the Intel H55 chipset itself. Measuring just 4 cm x 4 cm and 1cm tall, this tiny passive heatsink is just big enough to keep this chip cool.

Around at the I/O panel things look very standard and there is nothing here that cannot be found on your typical H55 motherboard. The connections include a single PS/2 port, 6 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA, DVI, S/PDIF output, 6 audio jacks and a single Ethernet port. All very standard stuff, but these connections should provide more than enough connectivity for the average user.

The Gigabit LAN support for example, is provided by a Realtek RTL8111D where as Asus used the Realtek RTL8112L controller. The RTL8111D is a much more commonly used controller that utilizes the PCI Express bus. There is very little information available regarding the RTL8112L and therefore we are not exactly sure how these controllers compare.

The same Realtek ALC889 HD audio codec has been used, which supports 16/20/24-bit SPDIF input and output with up to 192kHz sample rate. Again this is one of the more impressive Realtek HD Codecs and it is an excellent addition to the H55M-UD2H.

Also once again, the JMicron JMB368 has been used to provide a single PATA port. This feature does allow the H55M-UD2H to support older PATA devices, and the single port can support two devices. This is a feature we feel is not exactly necessary to still support, though we understand that some users may find it useful.

However, Gigabyte went one step further and included the iTE IT8720 controller which provides a floppy disk drive connector, supporting up to 1 floppy disk drive. While we can understand the possible need for PATA support, surely floppy disk drive support can be dropped.

Unlike Asus, Gigabyte has included Firewire support by integrating a Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip which provides a pair of IEEE1394a ports (1 on the back panel, 1 via the IEEE 1394a bracket connected to the internal IEEE 1394a header). Of course the expansion Firewire bracket is not included, nor are any USB 2.0 brackets to utilize the other six ports, as was the case with the Asus P7H55-M Pro.

For starters the ports are mounted vertically rather than on a 90-degree angle at the edge of the motherboard. This can make them harder to access and more likely to conflict with devices installed into the motherboards expansion slots. Also, you may have noticed that there are only five ports and not six as we found on the Asus P7H55-M Pro.

The sixth port is located on the I/O panel, where it is used to provide eSATA support. Therefore, onboard users have just five ports rather than six. Truth be told, five ports is probably more than enough for most users, particularly those using an mATX motherboard.

Perhaps the biggest issue we have with the H55M-UD2H is how close the four DDR3 DIMM slots come to the primary PCI Express x16 slot. With virtually any graphics card installed into the primary PCI Express slot removing/installing memory modules will be near enough to impossible. This confliction can become annoying when swapping out hardware.

Something worth mentioning is that although the H55M-UD2H features two PCI Express x16 slots, one of them is a fake. The secondary slow will take full length PCIe x16 graphics cards, but it will limit their bandwidth to x4 bandwidth.

This is not ideal for Crossfire graphics cards and we do not recommend using this technology, at least with a pair of PCIe x16 graphics cards on this motherboard. In fact, this applies to all Intel H55 motherboards, as there simply are not enough PCI Express lanes available.

Therefore we feel Gigabyte would have been better off with the Asus design approach of sticking the extra PCI Express slot above the primary PCIe x16 slot. This frees up room between the PCIe x16 port and the DIMM slots, removing that confliction and ensures that the extra PCIe slot can be used with a dual-slot graphics card installed.

Finally, the I/O panel of the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H has a little more going on, with a single PS/2 port, Ethernet port, eSATA port, Firewire port, S/PDIF output, six USB 2.0 ports and 6 audio jacks. The display ports include HDMI, DVI, VGA and DisplayPort, which was not found on the Asus P7H55-M Pro for some reason.

The memory bandwidth performance of both Intel H55 motherboards is virtually identical given that both motherboards are utilizing the same memory timings and frequency. Furthermore, the controller is located in the processor and not the chipset, meaning that the motherboard design has even less impact on memory bandwidth performance.

When testing with EVEREST Ultimate Edition we find a similar story and again the H55 motherboards delivered the same results. On another note, the Core i3 540, which is not a quad-core processor despite featuring 4 threads, is only slightly slower in terms of memory bandwidth performance than the Athlon II X4 635. However when compared to the Core i5 750, which is a quad-core processor, the Core i3 540 was considerably slower.

The SPECviewperf v10 test shows almost no difference in performance between the Asus and Gigabyte H55 motherboards. It is interesting to note that in this test they did defeat the Athlon II X4 635 configuration, while they were faster than the Core i5 750 for the 3dsMax test yet considerably slower when testing with Maya.

The new CINEBENCH R11.5 benchmark measures both GPU and CPU performance. Both tests showed almost no difference in performance when comparing the two H55 motherboards for Asus and Gigabyte. Interestingly, while the Core i3 540/H55 combo was slower than the Athlon II X4 635/785G when measuring CPU performance, it was much faster in the OpenGL (GPU) test.

For the first time we see a slight difference in the results, as the Asus P7H55-M Pro gets away from the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H when testing with WinRAR. It is also interesting to note that while the Athlon II X4 635 is a true quad-core processor, it was slower than the Core i3 540 in both the single and multi-threading tests.

Microsoft Excel 2007 is the first real-world application we have tested with and as you can see, it fails to separate the Asus and Gigabyte H55 motherboards. This test also indicates that the Intel processors are far better optimized for this application.

This time round, with WinRAR, we are conducting our own tests rather than simply using the inbuilt benchmark. Interestingly, when simulating the compression of a 400MB application, the Core i3 540/H55 configurations were only just able to match the Athlon II X4 635. However when compressing a 700MB video file they were considerably faster.

HandBrake is well optimized for quad-core processors and as a result the Core i3 540 does get left behind when compared to the Athlon II X4 and Core i5 processors. Still, when comparing the Core i3 540 on either the Asus P7H55-M Pro or Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, we end up with pretty much the same result.

The x264 HD Benchmark also shows the Core i3 540 to be at a real disadvantage to the quad-core processors. Still both the Asus P7H55-M Pro and Gigabyte H55M-UD2H motherboards produced the same result, with 50fps each.

Finally, when using TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress to measure encoding time, we see that the H55 motherboards both took over 12 minutes. The Asus P7H55-M Pro was slightly faster here, taking 14 seconds less, though overall this is a negligible difference.

In terms of gaming performance both the Asus P7H55-M Pro and Gigabyte H55M-UD2H delivered the same performance when testing with Unreal Tournament 3. This made them only slightly slower than the Athlon II X4 635 and considerably slower than the Core i5 750.

Far Cry 2 is more demanding on the GPU when compared to Unreal Tournament 3, and as a result the performance margin separating the Core i3 540 and Core i5 750 processors is much smaller. More importantly, we see virtually the same performance produced by both H55 motherboards.

In terms of power consumption both of the H55 motherboards again produced similar results. The Asus P7H55-M Pro was slightly more hungry at idle, while it used slightly less under full load.

Furthermore, because both of these Intel H55 motherboards are priced within $5-$10 of one another, they cannot exactly be separated here either. So everything comes down to features and build quality, though because we are talking about Asus and Gigabyte here, build quality is a bit of a none issue.

When comparing features we do have a clear cut winner in our opinion, and that winner is the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H. There really is no arguing that the H55M-UD2H is the better equipped of these two motherboards, as it features everything the Asus P7H55-M Pro does with a few extras.

The key advantage of the H55M-UD2H is its Firewire support, and while this is not a lot to go on as not everyone is going to find this feature useful, its absence on the P7H55-M Pro gives Gigabyte the edge. Additionally, Asus failed to provide DisplayPort on the P7H55-M Pro where as this feature can be found on the H55M-UD2H, improving connectivity further.

Gigabyte also provides better expansion slots, and although we do not recommend using this motherboard with a pair of Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards, it is possible, albeit with a performance hit due to the limited x4 bandwidth of the second graphics card.

There was one very small thing that we did not like about the H55M-UD2H and I must stress this is a very small issue. Whereas the Asus P7H55-M Pro features three fan headers, which we believe to be the absolute bare minimum a motherboard should offer, the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H provides just two. Again we know this is only a very small issue, but it can be a pain when it comes time to connect the front case fan.

Overall, at just over $100 US both these motherboards provide an excellent level of performance and features. Truth be told you would be hard pressed to go wrong with either option, though we feel to get the best bang for your buck the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H is certainly the way to go.

Gigabyte H55M-UD2H