ECS H57H-MUS Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Intel H57 chipset is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports with RAID support (0, 1, 5 and 10 – the product manual and the manufacturer website fail to mention RAID support), no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control) and eight x1 PCI Express lanes.

ECS H57H-MUS provides all the six SATA-300 ports, which are installed on the motherboard edge and rotated 90°, so installing video cards won’t block them. An eSATA-300 port is available on the rear panel, controlled by a JMicron JMB360 chip. Two SATA-600 ports are available on one of the companion expansion cards, which we will be talking about next page.

Figure 4: SATA ports.

In Figure 4 you can also see the buzzer behind the SATA ports and the clear CMOS button next to the 24-pin power supply connector.

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. The same goes for a floppy disk drive controller.

This motherboard has all the 14 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, eight soldered on the rear panel and six available through three motherboard headers. Two USB 3.0 ports are available on one of the expansion cards that come with the product and that we will be covering in the next page. H57H-MUS  doesn’t support FireWire ports.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec, which is a eight-channel component. Unfortun
ately Realtek doesn’t post detailed information about this codec, so we can’t talk about the audio quality of this motherboard. ECS H57H-MUS comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output and you can add a coaxial SPDIF output installing an adapter on the motherboard “SPDIF01” header (see it in Figure 2). You will have to “kill” either the mic in or the line in jacks if you want to install an analog eight-channel speaker set.

ECS H55H-CM has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, controlled by two Realtek RTL8111DL chips, which are connected to the chipset using one x1 PCI Express lane each. They support the teaming feature, that allows them to operate in parallel to double the available bandwidth to 2 Gbps, if you have a compatible switch.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with VGA output, DVI-D output, HDMI output, eight USB 2.0 ports, eSATA-300 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, optical SPDIF output and shared 7.1 analog audio jacks.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel.

As you can see this motherboard doesn’t have keyboard and mouse PS/2 connectors, so you will need to use a keyboard and a mouse with USB connection.

This motherboard comes with an HDMI, a DVI-D 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 use the optical SPDIF output.