ECS H55H-I Review: Mini-ITX at a Sensible Price
by Rajinder Gill on May 6, 2010 6:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
The H55H-I follows Intel’s standard H55/H57 mini-ITX layout. CPU socket placement is very close to the PEG slot and the DIMM slots to the right, leaving most tower type coolers out of the equation if using tall DIMMs.
The SATA ports and front panel connecters are placed at the top left of the board along with the CMOS jumper. Given the overclocking options provided and the fact that ECS’ BIOS does not have any kind of safe-boot feature, a rear panel button would have been a better choice.
Power delivery is taken care of by a three phase circuit for VCC, while VTT and VAXG get one phase supplies repectively. We’d guess that all FETs used can pump out around 30 amps each, so not a lot of room for overclocking four core processors.
This is probably the most barren backside we’ve seen on a mini-ITX board to date. There's more than enough room to use coolers with backplates, although we can’t see many people wanting to do that.
Most of what you need is provided on the backplate, the only exception being PS/2 for those of you with older keyboards and mice.
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Rajinder Gill - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
I'll try and find out ASAP and report back if need be. I did hear this had happened on some H55 boards in the past (RAID cards in primary PEG slot triggering an IGP shut-off) - but am not sure if it was fixed via a BIOS update or not.later
Raja
kaborka - Saturday, May 8, 2010 - link
I don't understand why HTPC performance wasn't included in the review. Is the onboard graphics good enough for 1080P and BD decoding?Rajinder Gill - Sunday, May 9, 2010 - link
Hi,The Clarkdale IGP handles HD video playback fine. We do run HD video as part of the power consumption tests (although not as a benchmark).
regards
Raja
aaaaaa - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
Do you have any numbers for ECS H55H-I performance with Lynnfield processors?pvdw - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
PS/2 ports aren't needed since there are cheap adapters available that will support a ps/2 keyboard and mouse from one USB slot.rodders27_uk - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
You would be surprised how much still runs on ISA cards within industries, if you pay £15-20k per card for example, with 4-5 cards or more in a server, they can often outlast the underlying server hardware by 2-3 times. Companies just don't want to re-spend money like that when the card still works fine.Dopeyd - Monday, July 5, 2010 - link
Not sure if this was covered but I've noticed that sticking a raid cards in the PCIe for the mini-itx on H55 chipset have caused some systems to halt (gigabyte), have you been able to test this out on the ECS?