ECS H55H-I Review: Mini-ITX at a Sensible Price
by Rajinder Gill on May 6, 2010 6:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Far Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. For single GPU results we set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with 2xAA.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to Ultra, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
AutoCAD 2010 x64—Cadalyst 2008
We utilize AutoCAD 2010 x64 and the Cadalyst Labs 5 benchmark.
For some reason the H55H-I holds a clear advantage in this benchmark.We've tried everything we can to reproduce these kind of scores on other boards and can't get close.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
67 Comments
View All Comments
gaidin123 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I've had this board for a couple weeks now paired with an i3-530 and it's been solid running at just under 160Mhz Bclk at stock voltage. It's by far the cheapest p55/h55/h57 mini-itx board yet it has more than enough features for most imho. Lian-li's got a few mini-itx cases out and hopefully the lan-gear guys get their mini-itx gamer case out at a reasonable price soon...Gaidin
shamans33 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Can IGP and Discrete Graphics be enabled at the same time?Rajinder Gill - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
No that's a lock-out by Intel afaik.later
Raja
howiey - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Thanks for this review. It was thorough, concise and it actually addresses what many want to know aside from the OC issues. For example, S3 suspend is crucial for HTPC and basically a dealbreaker for many on the Zotac mini-ITX boards, yet a surprising number of reviews ignore this in their reviews, focusing on Crysis benchmarks at 5 different resolutions. Worse is that the conclusion is that it basically performs the same as other H55 boards, so NO new information is gained by the reader. That you read the comments about HDMI / DVI simultaneous output and actually followed up is commendable, so thanks for your efforts.Rajinder Gill - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Thanks for the feedback!Mr Perfect - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I was very interested in this board when they said it supported i7 chips, but a little less so now that I see the 85w limit. That cuts the supported i7s down to exactly one, the 82w i7-860S. Still, no one else bothered to enable the 860S on their H55/57 m-ITX boards, so they get exclusive credit for that.Grug - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I just built one of these for my sister. i3-540 CPU and the WinSis mitx case at Newegg. I've never built one that small and was amazed how much power was packed into a tiny little case just the size of two laptops stacked on top of one another.For anyone who doesn't game and need an external GPU and just wants a high performance day to dayer, these ITX solutions are as good as it gets. I would replace my full sized ATX case in a heartbeat if the damn GPU vendors weren't such power pigs. I want a low profile GPU that works at under 75W and allows me to play modern games at 1900x1200. Until that happens (probably a few years at least), I consider NVidia/ATI inept.
My only disappointment was that you couldn't undervolt. I wanted to undervolt it a bit to try to cut down even further on the already low heat output.
dlmartin53 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
I know this is off subject but it seems the AMD motherboard scene is non-exsistant judging by the fact you have to go way back to see any mention of that other camp. You do mention them in testing data but no AMD Mboards reviewed for many months? I like all the Intel coverage, but would like to see more than just reviews of the latest AMD chip coming out.I will get off my soapbox now, thanks.
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Hi,Last AMD board we reviewed was the - the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro in March:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2959
We'll be adding some 890FX coverage in at some point - got another couple of guys working with me now, so things should improve.
Regards
Raja
nubie - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
Well, they did 'invent' the DTX specification, where you get 2 slots. Good both for the dual-slot gaming crowd, and the people who want wifi and a RAID card, or a single slot video card.After they released the DTX spec I was excited, but I don't think a single board came out of it.
Those in the know will buy an HP "DTX" motherboard from their SFF systems, but being OEM I don't think they are the greatest motherboards (no idea if any of them support the Athlon II x2, the only chip I would want in an AMD mITX/DTX system. ) Also they use a non-standard connecter, not good. Pluses would be dual-channel ram and a pcie x16, but it was a couple years ago, and look where we are today, a whole bunch of boards with those features.