Intel’s newest chipset offerings, the H55 and H57, promise to bring good performance at a reasonable price. The chipsets are very similar with only a few major differences. The most glaring difference is the lack of RAID support on the H55, while the H57 does offer it. The other major difference is the amount of supported USB ports, the H55 supports 12, while the H57 supports 14. Combine either of these chipsets with one of the Intel processors offering built in graphics, and you’re well on your way to a price-conscious build. This review will be on EVGA’s H55 offering, the 123-CD-E635-KR .
How will EVGA implement the H55 chipset while keeping with it’s reputation of building high performance and highly overclockable motherboards? Read on as we explore this latest offering from EVGA!
Let’s begin by exploring the H55 chipset and what it has to offer. Here is the block diagram of how the chipset integrates with the processor and other system features.
As you can see, there are many features packed in to this chipset design. One of the more unique features is the ability to run graphics that are built into select Intel i5 and i3 processors. If you’re wondering exactly which processors offer built in graphics, here is the current list at the time of this review.
| Processor | Processor Frequency | Graphics Frequency |
| i5-670 | 3.46 GHz | 733 MHz |
| i5-661 | 3.33 GHz | 900 MHz |
| i5-660 | 3.33 GHZ | 733 MHz |
| i5-650 | 3.20 GHZ | 733 MHz |
| i3-540 | 3.06 GHz | 733 MHz |
| i3-530 | 2.93 GHz | 733 MHz |
Now that we have a feel for the H55 chipset and what it’s feature set is, lets move on to a more in depth look at this EVGA board.
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