Asus P7H57D-V EVO; Poked, Prodded and Tested

Value
The Asus P7H57D-V EVO sells for $200 at Newegg.com and other e-tailers.  This is quite a price for what is supposed to be a mainstream/entry level product. The price is somewhat justified by performance and the features that are packed into the board, but not fully. However, this is only if you are going to try and drop on of the 6xx series Core i5s. As this board will support the stock 1156 Core i5 and i7s it actually might make a good choice for the i5 750 at this price. For the most part the price is a little high for this board in our opinion.

Support
Asus has, in the past gotten a bad name for customer support. There have been complaints of poor website performance, poor phone tech support and many other items. However, in the last couple of years Asus has made a good effort to change these shortcomings and have even stepped up their “back end” support. They do continue to be one of the few companies that continue to support EOL products with BIOS updates and driver support.  Overall, after dealing with many companies, Asus has good support for those that buy their products; it is just not always in the way they want it.

Conclusion
Overall I liked the P7H57D-V EVO, I feel it is a little overpriced for the market it is aimed at but think that Asus has banked on the flexibility and performance of the board to overcome that issue. I was surprised that it did not perform better with PCMark Vantage, but I have a feeling that the issue is something that might be fixed with an adjustment in the BIOS. The feature set included with the P7H57D-V EVO is excellent. The EPU/EPU-6 combination works well for the mainstream [and power conscious] market while the TurboV EVO software will be fun for those looking to tweak their system for more performance.  The inclusion of USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 is the one place that the H57D-V EVO seems out of place. There are very few SATA 3.0 drives available at the time of this writing while USB 3.0 is also in limited supply. This will change over time but, for now these features are probably not enough to encourage someone to buy the P7H57D-V EVO over another [perhaps less expensive] motherboard.

Still the P7H57D-V EVO does have something that makes it attractive to a higher market. Its overclocking performance has been the best we have found in the H5x series. I imagine that it would do quite well with the CPUs that do not have an IGP on the CPU. This could make it a great buy for someone looking to get an entry level dual or quad core and push it.  In the end if you are building an entry level or mainstream system the P7H57D-V EVO is probably not for you; If you are looking for a great performing system with room to push your CPU then you might want to pick one of these up.