ECS H55H-I Mini ITX

[Skyguy]

The ECS H55H-I is a mini ITX motherboard that offers respectable features and performance to value-conscious consumers. Sporting a wide array of video connection ports including HDMI, analog and optical audio, eSATA, and even space for a discrete PCI-Express graphics card if you want, the H55H-I looks to be a nice option for LGA1156 value seekers.



Click HERE for the full review.

[bullydog]

Always had a liking towards mini-ITX especially accomodating the i3/i5 series cpu from intel. Not forgeting a PCI-E 2.0 slot this could be used as a nice portable Lan party machine.

[Skyguy]

Hey, if you could manage to fit a Radeon 5670, for example, into a smallform case, you could have a sleeper of a little rig on your hands. Otherwise, very nice for HTPC.

[Orville]

Jake,


I would like to consider the ECS H55H-I motherboard, you just reviewed, for my current project. Yea, I'm one of those HTPC guys, at least for the time being. I'm calling this computer a LAN Media Client. I looked into commercial, under the HDTV set, products out there and finally rejected them all because none of them did everything I wanted. The result of my study was that the only real benefit that any of these offered was low price. Low price is obviously important, but so is functionality. I bought a real thin Cooler Master chassis that resembles a small Blu-ray player to house my components. It has a 150 watt PSU inside that stays above 80% efficiency for loads below 100 watts. I also bought a Core i3 530 CPU that is the lowest frequency Clarkdale that still carries the 733 MHz IGP. Finally, I bought a pair of 1.35 volts 2GB DDR3-1333 DIMMs.


My goal is to play Blu-ray movies from a LAN server on my HDTV. I will also play music from the same server. Then I will begin to experiment with Internet web sites on the TV set.


I will be hung out to dry if the i3 530 IGP doesn't provide high quality video decoding because there is no budget for a big power ATI 5xxx GPU. Some have written that the i3 530 does a quite good job of Blu-ray video decoding. I hope so. I am starting out to do this job on 60 watts maximum active power, or less, with an idle power of 20 watts, at the wall. I will probably have to underclock the i3 530 CPU, while leaving the IGP clock fixed, to reach these numbers. I plan to have only two fans in the box, the standard CPU fan and a PSU fan. I will endeavor to make them quiet.


I hope that you can answer a few questions I have about the ECS H55H-I motherboard. The first is about the power draw for the ECS H55H-I with an i3 530 CPU. I noticed that you used an i3 540, not so different, for your review. Did you make any idle/active power measurements? If so, what were the results? My second question is about the BIOS. Does it allow customizing the CPU Voltage and the CPU Clock Frequency for minimum power consumption?


Next I would like to ask about the HD audio features of the motherboard. I plan to get audio through the board's HDMI port which will be connected to my AV receiver. The receiver has several HDMI inputs and can decode all current Blu-ray audio streams, including bitstreamed Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. This way the computer's audio will reach my 5.1 channel speaker system in all its glory, something I have been trying to get to for years. This motherboard uses the Realtek ALC892 CODEC chip which I don't know zip about. If you go to Realtek's web site, you are warned to get ALC892, and all other audio chip drivers, from the motherboard maker because they will have customized the drivers to support the features of their respective motherboards. I don't think it would be prudent for me to spend all of this money and not get excellent audio. I want to know if the ECS H55H-I provides bitstreamed Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA out the HDMI port. Did you check that out?


Finally, I have a question about the Gbit NIC on the ECS H55H-I. Just about every home NAS server out there moves huge files, like 25GB Blu-ray movie files, using a sequence of jumbo frames. This is way faster than using the shorter, regular Ethernet frames. But to use jumbo frames the server and the client must first negotiate and agree to use the longer frames. So, I'm hoping to find out that the ECS H55H-I Gbit NIC and driver support jumbo frames, which would work well with my NAS. I downloaded their motherboard manual and saw that the NIC listed for the ECS H55H-I was a RealtekRTL8111DL chip. I thought this was a little strange since the H55 chipset includes Intel's Gbit NIC MAC function inside which would just have to have a NIC PHY added to the motherboard. Intel is pushing their 82578DC Gbit PHY on motherboard makers to mate up with the H55/H57 chipsets to provide Gbit Ethernet. But the 82578DC is a no performance chip the doesn't support jumbo frames. It's weird to me that Intel would push such a no performance PHY into applications that are so media (big file) oriented. However, the Realtek RTL8111DL is capable of jumbo frames if ECS ships the correct driver for Win 7 64-bit and Vista 64-bit. Did you notice whether or not ECS drivers provide jumbo frame support? Lastly, the RTL8111DL is a PCIe device that should be connected to a PCIe 2.0 port to work right. The H55/H57 chipsets only provide PCIe 1.0 ports so to work right the RTL8111DL would have to be connected to the CPU's 16xPCIe 2.0 graphics port. Did you notice how ECS connects up the RTL8111DC?


I would appreciate your comments very much.


Orville