ECS Elitegroup H55H-M

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 15 February 2010 at 01:00 AM EST. Page 3 of 3. 2 Comments.

BIOS:

Elitegroup Computer Systems once again employs American Megatrends Inc for the BIOS on this most recent motherboard. Found in the AMI BIOS for the H55H-M are the standard features and options commonly found and then the basic frequency/voltage options supported by ECS. ECS eJIFFY as their quick-booting Linux OS installed onto the hard drive for web surfing is supported on the H55H-M just like the P55H-A, but again while it is nice to see them embrace some Linux OS, eJIFFY is rather arcane and not very innovative. This BIOS supports upping the CPU voltage to +0.315V while the DDR3 memory voltage can be pushed +0.63V.

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Testing:

We tested out the ECS H55H-M v1.0 motherboard with an Intel Core i3 530, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, an OCZ Vertex SSD, OCZ StealthXStream power supply, and was housed within a SilverStone Grandia GD04. We have used Fedora 12, Fedora Rawhide, Ubuntu 9.10, and Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshots on this motherboard. The motherboard has run without any problems (besides the graphics issues with the Clarkdale CPU itself) and the only complaint we have is no support for this motherboard with LM_Sensors for integrated voltage/fan/thermal monitoring, but at this time it's hard to find any recent Intel motherboards supported by the Linux sensor monitoring stack.

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This is our first official Intel H55 motherboard review and you can find benchmarks of the ECS H55H-M within our Core i3 Linux benchmarks and the Clarkdale graphics benchmarks. This motherboard will also be found in other upcoming reviews. We were also able to overclock the Core i3 530 a bit, as detailed in our Intel Clarkdale review.

Conclusion:

If you are looking for a micro ATX motherboard that is compatible with Clarkdale's Core i3 and Core i5 processors whether it is just for a small form factor PC or is being built with intentions of media playback, the ECS H55H-M is a rather nice introductory offering. The expansion capabilities for this motherboard are not the best we have seen among H55 motherboards, but it has dual DDR3 slots, a single PCI Express x16 slot, two PCI Express x1 slots, and room for six Serial ATA 2.0 drives. Unfortunately, the only display connectors on this motherboard are VGA and DVI but no DisplayPort or HDMI, which would have made it an even better fit for a HTPC. This motherboard runs fine with Linux distributions employing a recent Linux kernel and it runs well as our benchmarks shown. In upcoming releases of LM_Sensors the system sensor monitoring support should be in place, after which we have nothing at all to complain about in terms of Linux compatibility. The ECS H55H-M motherboard is currently retailing for $80 USD at NewEgg, which makes it one of the most affordable Intel H55 motherboards you will be able to find at this time. If the feature set of this motherboard is good enough for you, we have no problems recommending it for Linux usage.

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