so I haven't looked at many EVGA boards lately but I thought why not so I'm
going to have a look today at the EVGA h55 V this is an h55 motherboard that
means it's compatible with all core I3 Core i5 and core i7 processors on LGA
1156 so what that means though is that
not all of the features are necessarily compatible with the processors so if you
are running say for example a core I3
dual core processor you will be able to run Onboard video if you're running a
core i5 quad core or a core i7 on this
particular motherboard the Onboard video won't work you'll have to install an
addin graphics card so a little bit more on that shortly EVGA first of all
includes a huge visual guide to your new motherboard I love these I think that
they're a really nice touch they give you a full size picture like actual size
picture of the motherboard where they label all of the important components
and they also give you some quick instructions on how to do the various
things you might have to do so you can see the well okay we're not going to
look at the picture for too long because obviously we have a real motherboard
here that we could look at instead so once I get this opened up I will
definitely have a closer look at all the different features next we find an IO
Shield okay fairly runof-the-mill IO Shield next Inside the Box we find two
black straight SATA cables so either of
these are right angle something to note about the EVGA SATA cables is one end
features a lock and the other end has no lock so the Locking end is intended to
go into your motherboard they also include a Molex to two SATA power
connectors and these have a lock on them that's something I haven't seen before
it's there's actually a little lever there that you press interesting yeah
I've never seen that before then we have a USB PCI bracket next we have a driver
CD do not use it download the latest drivers off the the EVGA website next we
have the EVGA h55 V motherboard installation guide so installing the CPU
the CPU fan the system memory the io shield and securing the motherboard into
the system case they also cover all the power connectors you'll have to
configure as well as the front panel connectors for things like uh the case
power case reset all that kind of stuff
all right so let's get this board out and this is another one of my favorite
things about EVGA boards and I'm going to break the
suspense in just a moment as soon as I get the board out of the bag this thing
please read before CPU installation that is the funniest thing ever step one and
step two and step three and step four so
they actually give you all the instructions to install your CPU in such
a way that you cannot possibly even attempt it without reading the
instructions so like all h55 motherboards we've we've got support for
dual Channel DDR3 memory we have an LGA
1156 socket here they are I can't tell what brand of socket they're using so I
guess we won't get too much further into that power connectors are in their
almost optimal locations we've got the 24 pin here but the four pins kind of in
no man's land all over here something to note though because this is a microatx
motherboard the odds of it being a bad thing for the four pin power to be here
are much less because many microatx cases don't actually have conventional
layouts in terms of where the motherboard and the power supply goes so it's quite possible you won't run into
any problems with that now there is one that is a bit of a problem I don't
really like the layout of the SATA ports because the PCI Express connector here
if you have a dual slot card is actually going to potentially cover these three
ports and make it difficult to access them that said this is a fairly low-end
board so if you're installing an add-in graphics card you're probably not
putting in a super high-end long one so for most people it's probably going to
be a non-issue like I said before SATA ports so we've got five here down at the
bottom USB headers there are plenty there are 1 2 3 4 USB headers and they
are colorcoded bright pink so that you can find them very easily next we've got
the chipset and the h55 chipset obviously doesn't produce a whole lot of
heat you've got this little tiny heat sink on it not a whole lot going on in
there I think next we've got expansion so you've got one Legacy PCI slot one
PCI 1X slot one PCIe 4X slot and one
PCIe 16x Graphics slot I wouldn't have minded seeing those switched around so
that you can use a graphics card and the 4ex slot but really there aren't too
many add-in cards that go into a 4X slot these days so I wouldn't worry too much
about it this appears to be front panel audio and then I guess that pretty much
does it for the top side of the board
let me see if there's anything else
noteworthy oh I have never seen something that looks
like this before there this is totally irrelevant and I don't know what it does
but I've never seen one of these on a motherboard before that is all let's go
around to the back panel so you've got two PS2 ports one for the mouse one for
the keyboard and let's get a little bit more into this Onboard video issue
you've got a VGA port a DVI port and an HDMI port now unless you're using a core
I3 or a core i5 dual core and please
note that I'm grouping in the Pentium dual core LGA 1156 with the core I3 LGA
1156 all of those feature Onboard video
on the CPU so that means that all it is is a pass through from the CPU's Onboard
video to these ports so unless you're using a CPU with Onboard video they're
just dead ports for decoration you can plug something into them but they won't
do anything next we have four USB ports
that's not a lot of USB ports for a for an h55 motherboard but I mean you can
always use a hub it's not that big of a deal you've got a gigabit Ethernet port
one ESAT Port that's really nice to see on such an entry-level board and then
you got 7.1 audio thanks for checking out my quick unboxing and product
overview of the EVGA h55 V