ECS H55H-I Review: Mini-ITX at a Sensible Price
by Rajinder Gill on May 6, 2010 6:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final words
Much of what the ECS H55H-I can and cannot do bears a startling resemblance to Intel’s DH57JG. The only major difference is that ECS are keeping a loose grip on the voltage reins for all processors at present, so you get more room to play with overclocking. Of course, there are no guarantees that future BIOSes will allow such a free range of voltage, especially if users end up blowing up FETs and such.
Whichever way ECS decide to lean, there are a few things on the H55H-I that are in need of attention – unsurprisingly, its ECS’ decision to allow overclocking that opens the can of worms. The CPU multiplier ratio control option should either be removed altogether, or it should be made to work. In its current state the option is useless, serving only to create non-POST situations. This is the second motherboard we've reviewed from ECS in recent months with this problem.
One of the other things that come to light when a BIOS setting is wrong, is that there’s no way to get the board to POST unless you clear CMOS. The trouble is that the CMOS clear jumper location is not easy to access when this board is in a case, so ECS would be wise to spend some time refining the BIOS code to perform some kind of watchdog procedure. These are the kind of things we expect to see implemented if overclocking features are present - regardless of price.
On the bright side, you do get a 3 year limited warranty, which at least inspires a little confidence that ECS will take care of you if the event of a failure.
To cap this all off, yes, the H55H-I is competitive with other mini-ITX products based upon its price and basic functionality, it makes a great little stock-runner or LAN PC. However, if you're thinking of overclocking with this board, we'd say that ECS is a couple of BIOSes away from a glowing recommendation - we'd like to see a little more finesse please!
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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.