Gigabyte H55M-USB3 - The Ultimate $100 H55 Board?

[Rob Williams]

Finding a great H55 board to match up with your Clarkdale CPU isn't hard, as the market currently has a great selection. But Gigabyte's H55M-USB3 stands out, as it has a superb feature-set for its ~$100 price tag, and also proves itself in our tests as being a great all-around board, and one that seems to have no limit in overclocking.

You can read our full review here and discuss it here!

 

[Doomsday]

wow! this really is a bang for buck mother board! Awesome!

 

[Optix]

Great little board. Classic Gigabyte all the way.

The only thing is I wonder how many people will jump at this board and pair it with a separate video card?

The P55M-UD2 has all of these features except for USB 3.0 and can, as one review site said "overclock the nuts off of an i5 750" at around the same price tag plus you gain RAID support.

I guess it comes down to what you plan on doing - RAID or connecting say and external HDD.

 

[crowTrobot]

This looks fantastic. I am looking at building an HTPC sometime (possibly a gaming HTPC) and these new h55 offerings are really enticing.

I'm surprised GIGABYTE still included an IDE and Floppy port on a micro-atx board.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm surprised GIGABYTE still included an IDE and Floppy port on a micro-atx board.

So am I, and to be honest, I wish they were gone. I'd have to imagine that the number of people to ever take advantage of either of those is small, given that most people who buy this board won't be upgrading, but building a new machine. I just hate the look of the connectors... they remind me way too much of trying to fix bent pins on an IDE hard drive with tweezers. Not fun.

 

[stevea]

I've been running a home server off this board since January. Sweet board.

I had some fan control issues (always high), resolved by updating the firmware.

I'm using an i5-640 OC'ed to 4Ghz, and a Seasonic 200W 80+ PSU. The system idles at ~49 Watts, peak ~130W. This mobo is great for a low power system, so buy a PSU sized to the job, or expect to burn an extra 20+ watts.

 

[Rob Williams]

Whoa, that's nice. A CPU at 4GHz and the entire machine runs at just 130W peak? That's quite the setup!