Gigabyte H55M-S2H H55 Core i3 LGA1156 DDR3 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
906 words · ~4 min read
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well I have to confess it's taken me far too long to get started on unboxing the
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h55 motherboards that are available to me but I'm going to get started today
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we've got the h55m S2 this is a Gigabyte
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board it has their three-year standard warranty as well as a host of other
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features now this is an LGA 1156 board
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okay it supports Core i5 and core I3 has an h55 chipset blah blah blah HDMI DVI
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now what's interesting about those two things is that they only work if you're
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using a core I3 or a core i5 dual core
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as of the time of filming this so even though you've actually got support for
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the core i5 quad cores as well as the core i7 quad cores on LGA 1156 you
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cannot use the Onboard video if you're using one of those processors so the
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reason for that is that the Onboard video is actually on the CPU it is not
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on the motherboard chipset so this is a fairly low-end board we're going to get
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started here we've got a users's manual inside Windows 7 support awesome good to
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see all right then you've got your uh your driver installation DVD now this is
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very strange they've got like features on here that this board totally doesn't
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have which threw me off when I first opened this it does not have their 333
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onboard acceleration it does not have Ultra durable 3 okay that's like a very
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strange thing anyway don't use that DVD download the latest drivers off the Gigabyte website so then you've got your
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smart 6 a smart way for PC system management it's got a bunch of utilities
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and whatnot okay then you've got a multilingual installation guide book
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okay so a bunch of different languages shows you how to install a CPU how to install RAM pretty good stuff okay then
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you have an IDE cable and two SATA cables that is it for the cables
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included with this board and then you have an IO Shield okay that was all not
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all that exciting so let's get this board
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open all right so like I actually I
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didn't say this it's a microatx board it's a fairly low-end board so you're
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not going to find a lot of the high-end features now the H50 5 is kind of like a
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cut down p-55 in some ways so it has all the same basic support you've got
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support for the LGA 1156 socket you've got support for dual Channel DDR3 you've
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got support for PCI Express 16x * 1 now
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this board see this is a PCI Express 8X Port you can see that it's oh no this is
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a 4X Port it's an 8X port with four okay so this is not a crossfire ready board
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even though they've got a plastic 16x slot here it's actually only wired for
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4X so wouldn't get satisfactory Crossfire support even though they do
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have a crossfire logo here so it will run but if you're running any kind of
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decent high-end cards it's not going to get the best performance mind you if
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you're running Crossfire with decently high-end cards why are you buying this
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board anyway you've got your voltage Regulators here so the no extra cooling
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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
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have we still got a floppy Port got a couple USB headers there's your front
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panel connectors right there you've got six SATA 2 ports ports no SATA 3 ports
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are included with this board okay despite what it said on the driver disc
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the 24 Port the 24 pin power connectors on the right hand edge of the board in
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its desired place along with an IDE port and then up at the top of the board
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you've got your four pin power so this board does not have an 8 Pin power
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connector because I guess they figure you just don't need it with the kind of
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chips you should be putting in this board you've only got two slots for DDR3
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so that means you're going to be limited to a practical maximum of 8 gigs if you
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can afford 4 gig dims at this time which will likely go down in price but it is
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going to be a bit of a limitation for some users okay then on the back we've
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got a PS2 um keyboard mouse combo Port I really like these then we have eight USB
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2.0 ports no USB 3.0 ports and then we
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have three video outputs one VGA one DVI and one HDMI please note you cannot use
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these outputs they are just dead connections unless you are running a
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core I3 or a core i5 dual core with
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integrated graphics on the CPU okay then we've got onboard optical audio out
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onboard gigabit landan and 7.1 audio
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thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Gigabyte gah h55m s2h