ECS H55H-I Mini ITX motherboard review - Introduction

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 04/01/2010 02:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

ECS H55H-I Motherboard

Today, my friends, we will be talking about paradoxes and contradiction. It's been topic amongst many of the male versus female species for decades now and here at Guru3D today we will bring you the definitive answer to the eternal question ... does size matter ?!

See, today we'll see if 17 cm is enough for the average human being, we'll be reviewing the cutest little motherboard you have seen on a long time. Get this, it is a fully fetched motherboard based on the H55 chipset from Intel. It's sized only 17cm x 17 cm, and for those that do not recognize it, this is the Mini-ITX form factor. Popular in many scenario's like automotive, industry implementations but as we'll show you, with a motherboard like tested today truly excellent for HTPCs and even regular desktop PCs as well.

The product comes from ECS and is tagged as H55H-I, despite what you might think or feel about Mini-ATX, this little motherboard has it, it's packed and loaded with features. Pop on a Clarkdale based processor like the Core i3 or Core i5 series and you can use it's HDMI, DVI of DSUB graphics connector. Audio ? No worries the embedded Realtek ACL 8982 eight channel audio codec will happily output to analog or coaxial or optical TOSLINK S/PDIF connectors, need USB ? Well, the rear panel has six of them, need SATA2 ? Here we spot four ports and one eSATA, dual channel memory ? Yep supported, up-to 1600 MHz and in the end if you do not want to use the embedded graphics from the processor, then you can even pop in a full x16 PCIe graphics card and make a wicked gaming rig out of this incredibly handy H55H-I motherboard.

But talk is cheap, have a look at what we put to the test today. And here's something funny to realize, if you are using a 24" monitor right now, the photo below is real-size. That is the size of Mini-ITX -- cute huh ?

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ECS H55H-I Mini ITX motherboard review
We test the ECS H55H-I. It's been topic amongst many of the male versus female species for decades now and here at Guru3D today we will bring you the definitive answer to the eternal question ... does size matter ?! Pop on a Clarkdale based processor like the Core i3 or Core i5 series and you can use it's HDMI, DVI of DSUB graphics connector. Audio ? No worries the embedded Realtek ACL 8982 eight channel audio codec will happily output to analog or coaxial or optical TOSLINK S/PDIF connectors, need USB ? Well, the rear panel has six of them, need SATA2 ? Here we spot four ports and one eSATA, dual channel memory ? Yep supported, up-to 1600 MHz and in the end if you do not want to use the embedded graphics from the processor, then you can even pop in a full x16 PCIe graphics card and make a wicked gaming rig out of this very handy H55H-I motherboard.

ECS H55H-M motherboard review
If you can live just fine with just one Gigabit Ethernet connector, six SATA2 ports and analog 5.1 audio you can safe yourself a lot of buckaroonies alright. Yes you'd have a fairly high performance 'regular' PC which certainly doesn't have to be expensive. Today we look at such a product, it's the all new H55 chipset based ECS H55H-M motherboard priced at roughly 55 EUR / 79 USD. It comes in that all too familiar green PCB color, all the features you need to run a very decent PC, it's mATX based allowing much flexibility and even has a x16 PCIe slot should you want to seat a dedicated graphics card on it. And sure, being H55 -- if you pair it with a series 600 Core i5 processor or the Core i3 series (Clarkdale) processor you can make use of the embedded GPU inside that processor as well.