ECS H55H-I Motherboard
On-Board Peripherals
Contents
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-I provides four SATA-300 ports and one eSATA-300 port.
Figure 4: SATA ports.
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. A floppy disk drive controller isn’t available as well.
This motherboard has ten USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and four available through two motherboard headers. Being a low-cost product, it doesn’t support FireWire ports.
Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec, which is a eight-channel component. Unfortunately Realtek does not publish any information about this codec on their website, so we can’t analyze the quality of the on-board audio from this motherboard.
But there are terrific news about H55H-I: it features independent 7.1 analog audio outputs, coaxial SPDIF output and optical SPDIF output. The motherboard also has an SPDIF output header, allowing you to route digital audio to the DVI-D/HDMI outputs from NVIDIA-based video cards.
ECS H55H-I has a Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by a Realtek RTL8111DL controller, which is connected to the system through a x1 PCI Express lane.
In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with six USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, VGA output, DVI-D output, eSATA-300 port, Gigabit Ethernet port, coaxial SPDIF output, optical SPDIF output and independent 7.1 analog audio jacks.
As you can see, this motherboard doesn’t have PS/2 connectors for mouse and keyboard, so you must use USB devices.
Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel.
This product comes with three different kinds of video outputs, including HDMI. Together with the presence of SPDIF outputs and the small physical size of the board, this makes this product clearly targeted to users willing to build home theater computers (HTPC’s).