Zotac H55-ITX Review - The World's First mini-ITX H55 Motherboard
by Joshua Youngberg on February 28, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
For most of us, Zotac isn't the name that comes to mind when thinking about your next motherboard. Instead, brands like ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI are closer to the tip of your tongue. For HTPC users however, that all started to change with the release of several mini-ITX motherboards based on NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 and ION chipsets. Despite its initial teething problems, the Zotac ION ended up being the perfect motherboard for a DIY low powered HTPC capable of full 1080p video playback.
If you needed more CPU power, Zotac offered the LGA-775 socket GeForce 9300-ITX-WiFi. You got the same mini-ITX form factor, but support for Core 2 CPUs instead of the on-board Atom that its ION boards were limited to. With the release of Intel's first 32nm dual-core processors earlier this year, Zotac wanted to offer an updated platform for SFF or HTPC users who didn't want to sacrifice CPU performance. Based on Intel's H55 chipset and supporting the entire line of Core i3, i5 and LGA-1156 i7 CPUs, Zotac sent us its latest mini-ITX board: the H55-ITX WiFi.
There are a couple of possible directions you can take with the H55-ITX. First, you could choose to turn this into a low-watt HTPC by utilizing a Core i3 and relying on Intel’s HD graphics for your video needs. On the other hand, you could install an i5 or i7 and populate the PCIe slot with a dedicated graphics card for a nice mid-range gaming system. Cases such as the Silverstone SG-06 and the upcoming Lian-Li PC-Q08 would complement a system such as this perfectly.
With these two different directions in mind we have decided to test the H55-ITX with both integrated and dedicated graphics. Decide for yourself which direction works the best for you.
On a side note, even the performance computing market is seeing a transition away from the more traditional full-sized motherboards. In fact, ZOTAC markets only one full-sized ATX board in the US.
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Rajinder Gill - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
Hi Patrick,Sorry about that, we'll get it fixed asap..
regards
Raja
FaaR - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
Anandtech admins, you have some adbanner that irregularly appears on the site that uses javascript I believe and forcibly forwards users to "http: // 178.32.68.70 / index.html" (spaces inserted to prevent people from ending up there inadvertently). It just happened to me when trying to access this motherboard review. It also happened to me once on the Anandtech forum...Not sure what, if anything, you can do about this. Just wanted to mention it.
Ryan Smith - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
I've talked to our ad people and they've pulled a ton of stuff. Please let us know if any of you guys are still getting redirected.JonnyDough - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Now that's service. How does that happen in the first place though? :(damianrobertjones - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
..and how many people have been infected by this?Duwelon - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
This has been happening to me too on anandtech only (as far as I recall). AVG catches it and prevents the transfer to the site listed above. I've run Malwarebytes free and done AVG scans, nada. I'm a pretty safe surfer too so I don't know where i would have gotten infected anyway.Etern205 - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Run HiJackThis and analyze your log to see if there are anything else Malwarebytes and AVG haven't found.Another is GMER and ComboFix.
barkeater - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
My wife was surfing (mostly on Facebook) last night and received this same message. I wrote down the address and it matches perfectly with the one you provided:http//178.32.68.70/index.html
She woke me up and said my laptop has a virus. I had her set the laptop aside until I had a chance to look at in the morning. I closed out the browser, and ran ccleaner, then ran anti-malware, and now running anti-virus scan (CA Antivirus Suite). So for nothing.
I think it is a scam to get you to click on the exacutable which will then infect your computer. This has happend to us before and caused a great deal of grief.
I plan on reporting the web site/event to the folks at Microsoft to see what they recommend, as well as my own ISP and provider of my Anti-Virus software (CA).
PsychoPif - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
The adds are definitly becoming more intrusive. I'm getting a lot of muscle adds and last week, I got my first popup on Anand, a popup that told me I was infected and to get an anti-virus.I'm mostly browsing at work, so I'm locked in IE 6, I would love if the adds could be about something I would actually click, not some muscle pills.
That and I would be less inclined to copy/paste the text to notepad so it doesn't look like I'm browsing gay porn...
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
damianrobertjones - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Again, it couldn't possibly be anything to do with Anandtech or Toms :)As I posted before, clean machine, fresh install, then updated behind a firewall, AV installed, no other machines on the connection
Bam... re-direction.