At Vortez we have been mostly focussing on Intel X58 and AMD AM3 based motherboards but today I will be delving into a new category of board. LGA1156. New to Vortez, but certainly not new to the market, the LGA1156 platform first debuted Q3 2009/Q1 2010 and supports 45nm and 32nm processors in the flavour of Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 lineup - dual-core (Intel Core i5 650-760) and quad-core (Intel Core i7 860-880).

Coming in at a much lower price-tag to that of the big brother LGA1366, the LGA1156 platform allows consumers to channel into the Core i7 family of processors and get some quad-core goodness. In this first review of the LGA1156 category of motherboards I will be taking a close look at the H55M-LE from ASRock. A micro ATX sized board with one PCI-E x16 slot, one PCI-E x1 slot, integrated VGA and support for up to DDR3-2600+ (OC). Great for HTPC consumers on a budget, well at least so it seems!