Review: Gigabyte H55N-USB3 LGA-1156 Mini-ITX Motherboard

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[drupal=570]Review: Gigabyte H55N-USB3 LGA-1156 Mini-ITX Motherboard[/drupal]

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By: Trace Hagan

The latest arrival from Gigabyte is a mini-ITX motherboard, which is perfect for basing a small gaming rig upon. Featuring two DDR3 RAM slots and a PCI-E x16 expansion port, it has all the features you need to hit overclocking records, and do so with a small footprint. So what does this board hold in store for a Core-i5 655k? See pictures and a full review, after the jump...

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It's great to see more manufacturers making good miniITX boards...for too long it was just Zotac. What I would like to see them do is squeeze one more DIMM slot on there and switch it to LGA1366 instead. :twisted: Now there would be a recipe for an awesome little system.

Well 1366 is dead in a few months so I do not see a point in that.

..damn it Intel, would it kill you to stick with a socket for more than a year two years? :facepalm:

I haven't done much reading on it but there is a few reasons they are going back to a single socket for sandybridge.

TBH I had completely missed their socket plans, but according to Wikipedia (might be incorrect now, idk), they're sticking with 2 sockets, just changing them both. Granted, there are nice electrical upgrades (40 PCIe lanes in LGA2011), but looking through their plans just makes me long for AMD, where they actually plan electrical upgrades into their sockets...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2011

I do find it amusing, though, that they are releasing socket LGA2011 in 2011. :P

..sorry, OT.

Hmm I was not aware of 2011. Guess that's why I am in AMD man!

I could make a decent gaming rig off this board. Something to consider for my Mac Classic project.

Hi!

This is not the first serious mini-itx board with this sockle. I have a DFI Lan-Party with the same size and the same sockle, running a core I5 in it.
The main disadvantage of this board is that there is almost no space in between the PCI Express slot ant the Sockle. This makes it hard to install a flat cooler, like scythe shurikeen 2. (Edit: In addition to a graphic-card)

But I'm glad that you take the time to test mini-itx boards, I will continue watching this board, waiting for a mini-itx-rewiew for the sandy bridge! :up: