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
Board Layout
Expansion is inherently limited on a mini-ITX motherboard and ZOTAC decided to populate this lone spot with a PCIe x16 slot. Two DDR3 memory slots are available as well. It is worth noting that the CPU socket is actually located below the chipset on the H55-ITX.
Moving to the I/O portion of the motherboard you can see that Zotac did not hold back on the USB ports and by offering a total of 10. Two wireless antennae and a CMOS clear button are also available. For the first time on the Nehalem architecture we have a motherboard with integrated video outputs. On the Zotac, the available outputs consist of HDMI, DVI and VGA (via a DVI-to-VGA adapter).
An abundance of on-board SATA ports are provided by the P55 chipset. ZOTAC has also placed a hard drive activity light directly to the left of the SATA ports. The front panel connectors, fan headers and BIOS chip are located on the front of the motherboard. The mini-PCIe slot for the wireless module can be found between the RAM slots and chipset.
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wysiwygbill - Saturday, March 6, 2010 - link
There is apparently a problem with this motherboard that won't allow turbo boost to function. This wouldn't affect the i3 processors where you compared performance with the i3 but you didn't test any i5 processors or compare i7 performance with the DFI.I'd be interested to see how much difference the turbo boost would make by comparing i5 performance with the i3 or by comparing the i7 performance with a different motherboard.
That's assuming you aren't concerned with the DFI bursting into flames should you put an i7 in it. :-)
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, March 5, 2010 - link
$150 for this board is pure insanity. MAYBE if they soldered an i3 to the board it might be worth that much. What is the reasoning behind paying over $300 for a mob/cpu/RAM combo for something like an HTPC? How does this possibly justify a 50% premium versus a similar AMD HTPC setup?ROID R4GE - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
What I am most interested in (and haven't seen anyone mention) is finding out if this motherboard along with and i3 530 can handle playback of a 1080p .mkv file.have you done any testing of this type?
ROID R4GE - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
ok, if anyone is interested. the core i3 and this motherboard can handle a .mkv 1080p moviejustniz - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
The tests would have been A LOT more informative if you had included figures from the same tests on a full-sized motherboard with the same ram, cpu and graphics card, so we could see exactly how much of a penalty (if any) the just switching to the smaller size board brings.ScavengerLX - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
From my experience power consumption between an mATX and its mini-ITX counterpart is generally around a ~5 watts higher. Not a huge difference. I think it would be interesting to see how an ATX system compares to a comparable mini-ITX system though.Josh
willtriv - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
DFI had a x55 series ITX board on the market for a few months.Unless we are talking about h55 and it was a p55...
ggathagan - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Yes, this is an H55 chipset, allowing for the use of the i3/i5 on-die GPU, whereas DFI's board is P55, requiring an additional GPU card.karlkesselman - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
it seems to me that actually for IDLE power consumption the DFI motherboard is better than Zotac, is it not?We have:
Zotac H55 i3 530 (not igp) = 53 W
DFI MI-P55 i3 530 (not igp) = 43 W
So the DFI is 10 W lower on IDLE than Zotac. Can you confirm this? (I assume they use same video card in this case)
Ben - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Something in a banner ad in this article just tried to install a fake Antivirus on my computer!