ECS H55H-CM Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Intel H55 chipset is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports (no RAID support), no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control) and six x1 PCI Express lanes.

ECS H55H-CM provides all the six SATA-300 ports. If you install a dual-slot video card that is more than 7 ½” (19 cm) long, the video card will block two of the SATA ports.

Figure 4: SATA ports.

Like several other motherboards based on the Intel H55 chipset, ECS H55H-CM supports the old serial and parallel communication ports. A parallel port is actually soldered on the motherboard rear panel, as we will show you in a bit, and two serial ports (and not only one) are available, through headers on the board (the green headers shown in Figure 4). So in order to use them you will need to install adapters, which don’t come with the product.

The chipset doesn’t support a parallel ATA (PATA) port and this motherboard doesn’t come with an external controller supporting this kind of connection, however ECS H55H-CM does come with a floppy disk drive controller, feature not supported by most H55-based motherboards.

This motherboard has all the 12 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, six soldered on the rear panel and six available through three motherboard headers. Being a low-cost product, it doesn’t support FireWire ports.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC662 codec, which is a six-channel component. Other H55-based motherboards we’ve seen so far support eight-channel audio, but since this is a low-cost product we don’t see this as a drawback. In fact the signal-to-noise ratio provided by this chip isn’t bad at all for an entry-level product, with 90 dB for its analog inputs and 98 dB for its analog outputs. Other specs include a 24-bit resolution for its outputs but only 20-bit resolution for its inputs and 96 kHz sampling rate for its outputs and inputs.

The main problem with the on-board audio from this motherboard is the use of shared connectors, meaning that if you install an analog 5.1 speaker set you “kill” the mic in and line in connectors.

Luckily this motherboard has an on-board SPDIF output header, allowing you to add SPDIF outputs to this motherboard by installing an adapter that doesn’t come with the product.

ECS H55H-CM has a Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by the chipset, with an Intel 82578 chip making the interface with the physical layer.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rea
r panel with keyboard and mouse PS/2 connectors, parallel port, HDMI output, VGA output, eight USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port and shared 5.1 analog audio jacks.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel.

We were quite surprised to see a parallel port on this motherboard, an I/O connection that is dead for the end-user.

This motherboard comes with an HDMI and a VGA output, so you can use this motherboard to build an HTPC (Home Theater PC) without using adapters for the video output. If your home theater setup isn’t able to extract digital audio from the HDMI output, you can add an SPDIF output to this motherboard, as explained before.