ECS H55H-M motherboard review -
Introduction
In the land of less non-enthusiast hardware fanatics there's big bucks to be made on budget and more `economic´ products. Face it, they sell a dime a dollar and the volume on budget products is just so high compared to say high-end products. Funny thing is that the low-entry products often offer the best overall value.
See a motherboard like we'll be testing today has the H55 chipset and that all by tiself comes with a sturdy feature set, support for the latest Core i3 and I5 processors and well do not forget that the baseline performance (non overclocked) among motherboards with a similar sharing chipset is 99% similar to the more expensive products.
So if you can live just fine with just one Gigabit Ethernet connector, six SATA2 ports and analog 5.1 audio you can save 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. But make no mistake, it's compatible with say a Core i7 870 as well, So this 65 EUR ECS H55H-M motherboard, has everything .. including graphics (though very low level), DVI and SUB-D connector and that embedded IGP on the processor (not motherboard) will allow you to playback high-definition 1080P content.
So pair a motherboard like this with a proper processor and you already will have built yourself 80% of your PC. Not bad really, let's have a closer look.
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.