ECS has surely improved the quality of their motherboards: P55H-A comes only with solid capacitors and passive heatsinks on top of the transistors from the voltage regulator circuit, using a different shape, by the way.

P55H-A is a good option for your new Core i5 processor if you are looking for a mainstream motherboard. It comes with an attractive price, USD 135. Of course it could cost less (like everything in the world), but for a product based on a chipset that was released this week targeted to a brand new CPU line, we can’t complain. It costs less than competing products and thus provides a great cost/benefit ratio if you are building a PC based on the new Core i5 processor.

Of course if you want more options that those provided by P55H-A – especially SLI support – you will have to buy a different (and more expensive) product.

One final note: if you buy this motherboard make sure that the CPU Turbo Boost technology is enabled on the BIOS setup, for some strange reason on this motherboard this option defaults to disabled. Of course you want this option enabled in order to achieve the highest performance possible.