well I have to confess it's taken me far too long to get started on unboxing the
h55 motherboards that are available to me but I'm going to get started today
we've got the h55m S2 this is a Gigabyte
board it has their three-year standard warranty as well as a host of other
features now this is an LGA 1156 board
okay it supports Core i5 and core I3 has an h55 chipset blah blah blah HDMI DVI
now what's interesting about those two things is that they only work if you're
using a core I3 or a core i5 dual core
as of the time of filming this so even though you've actually got support for
the core i5 quad cores as well as the core i7 quad cores on LGA 1156 you
cannot use the Onboard video if you're using one of those processors so the
reason for that is that the Onboard video is actually on the CPU it is not
on the motherboard chipset so this is a fairly low-end board we're going to get
started here we've got a users's manual inside Windows 7 support awesome good to
see all right then you've got your uh your driver installation DVD now this is
very strange they've got like features on here that this board totally doesn't
have which threw me off when I first opened this it does not have their 333
onboard acceleration it does not have Ultra durable 3 okay that's like a very
strange thing anyway don't use that DVD download the latest drivers off the Gigabyte website so then you've got your
smart 6 a smart way for PC system management it's got a bunch of utilities
and whatnot okay then you've got a multilingual installation guide book
okay so a bunch of different languages shows you how to install a CPU how to install RAM pretty good stuff okay then
you have an IDE cable and two SATA cables that is it for the cables
included with this board and then you have an IO Shield okay that was all not
all that exciting so let's get this board
open all right so like I actually I
didn't say this it's a microatx board it's a fairly low-end board so you're
not going to find a lot of the high-end features now the H50 5 is kind of like a
cut down p-55 in some ways so it has all the same basic support you've got
support for the LGA 1156 socket you've got support for dual Channel DDR3 you've
got support for PCI Express 16x * 1 now
this board see this is a PCI Express 8X Port you can see that it's oh no this is
a 4X Port it's an 8X port with four okay so this is not a crossfire ready board
even though they've got a plastic 16x slot here it's actually only wired for
4X so wouldn't get satisfactory Crossfire support even though they do
have a crossfire logo here so it will run but if you're running any kind of
decent high-end cards it's not going to get the best performance mind you if
you're running Crossfire with decently high-end cards why are you buying this
board anyway you've got your voltage Regulators here so the no extra cooling
nothing like that all right let's just have a look at what we do have on this board stop talking about what it doesn't
have we still got a floppy Port got a couple USB headers there's your front
panel connectors right there you've got six SATA 2 ports ports no SATA 3 ports
are included with this board okay despite what it said on the driver disc
the 24 Port the 24 pin power connectors on the right hand edge of the board in
its desired place along with an IDE port and then up at the top of the board
you've got your four pin power so this board does not have an 8 Pin power
connector because I guess they figure you just don't need it with the kind of
chips you should be putting in this board you've only got two slots for DDR3
so that means you're going to be limited to a practical maximum of 8 gigs if you
can afford 4 gig dims at this time which will likely go down in price but it is
going to be a bit of a limitation for some users okay then on the back we've
got a PS2 um keyboard mouse combo Port I really like these then we have eight USB
2.0 ports no USB 3.0 ports and then we
have three video outputs one VGA one DVI and one HDMI please note you cannot use
these outputs they are just dead connections unless you are running a
core I3 or a core i5 dual core with
integrated graphics on the CPU okay then we've got onboard optical audio out
onboard gigabit landan and 7.1 audio
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Gigabyte gah h55m s2h