Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H Motherboard Review

Gigabyte have stuck with their trademark blue and white colour scheme with the H55M-UD2H.  The dark blue PCB is accompanied by light blue and white components, making for quite an attractive appearance overall.

The LGA1156 socket is positioned in the centre of the board, flanked by four DDR3 RAM slots.  These are located a little too close together for our liking as even medium-sized CPU coolers could obstruct one or more of the RAM slots.  We used a CoolIT ECO A.L.C. cooler for our testing to avoid this problem.

To the right of the RAM slots we find the FDD and IDE connectors alongside the 24-pin power connector.  We can’t see many people at all using the FDD and IDE connectors which makes us question why they have both been included on this board.  Sure there are some users who still use their old IDE hard drives but we would imagine that far more would prefer a larger gap between the CPU socket and the RAM to give room for a larger CPU cooler on such a small board.

Below these connectors we find the five SATA connectors and the Intel H55 chipset.  Although some people might be slightly disheartened about the lack of SATA 6Gbps ports, we can’t see this being a huge issue due to the low-mid end nature of the board.

To the left we find a single PCI-Express x16 slots, two PCI slots and a PCI-Express x4 slot.  These are what make this board a better choice for a HTPC build than a Mini-ITX board as you can hook up a dual slot graphics card, TV tuner and audio card at the same time, rather than having to choose between them.  The motherboard also supports ATI CrossFireX Technology.

The I/O connections could be more plentiful but the selection included should fulfil most users’ requirements.  They consist of a PS2 connector, an optical S/PDIF connector, a firewire port, six USB2.0 ports, an eSATA (3Gb/s) connector, an RJ-45 port and six 3.5mm audio jacks.  Gigabyte have covered all the bases for the onboard graphics, including a D-Sub port, a DVI-D port, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort connector.

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