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Page 1 of 8   Intel’s chip wave that appeared as suite for the new Core i3 and i5 CPUs codenamed Clarkdale, containing graphics cores within, was quickly followed by a plethora of motherboards from all sorts of manufacturers. We’ve decided to gather round all motherboards available at the market at the time of this review and determine whether it is wiser to base the decision about which motherboard to buy on the chip itself or the accompanying equipment and capabilities. We’ve had a total of seven models tested, signed by ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI, which are the most common choice of buyers.
A Small Difference in Names and Functions
Before we turn to the actual motherboards, let’s have a quick refresher on what the differences between H55 and H57 chips, which these motherboards are all based on, consist of. First and foremost, both are different from the preceding P55 by targeting the mainstream motherboard market segment, based on the support for graphics cores contained on the CPU itself. P55 motherboards certainly support the new CPUs after a BIOS update, but the graphics cores are still rendered unusable by that combination. This is the reason why all motherboards based on H55 and H57 also integrate the according video outputs – in fact, all three which are considered standard today (D-Sub, DVI and HDMI), while certain manufacturers even went as far as to enrich their models with a DisplayPort output.
Another hindrance for this generation of motherboards is that they’re unable to share PCI-Express graphics lines, since they can only officially possess one PEG 2.0 x16 slot. Motherboard manufacturers solve this problem by adding an additional “bridge” chip, which doubles the throughput capabilities of certain PCI-Express bus lines, which in turn enables SLI and CrossFire support – a system we’ve seen implemented on some models we’ve tested. As far as differences between the twin chips H55 and H57 themselves are concerned, they can be deemed irrelevant to most users, coming down to twelve versus fourteen USB 2.0 ports, six versus eight PCI-E x1 slots and the lack of official support for SLI/CrossFire and RAID HDD interconnecting on H55. Certain manufacturers threw in an additional PCI-E x16 2.0 slot onto their H55 motherboards in order to enable CrossFireX (not SLI) mode, but the second card in such a system would be working in PCI-E 1.1 x4 mode, which would certainly present a hindrance compared to the performance the same cards would be able to show on an H57 motherboard.
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MotherBoards 
