Features -
In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level.

You might think the H55N-USB3 would be devoid of features due to its smaller size, but you would be wrong. As you might have guessed the “USB3” part of the name stands for the USB 3.0 functionality one this little board. Still we like to break the advertised features down into our categories so you better understand them.

Excellent
Xpress BIOS Rescue
Xpress Recovery2
EasyTune 
ON/OFF Charge
DualBIOS™
USB3.0

The list here is a little odd, despite the fact that most of these are included on all of Gigabyte’s motherboards they are important here because of the sheer size of the H55N. It shows that GB is very serious about this product. They are pushing their same line up of enthusiast class features on this mini-ITX product.

In the middle (sort of good)
Dynamic Energy Saver™ 2
Smart 6™
Auto Green
These three items are decent features but also represent items that are usually not installed. Of the three the Dynamic Energy Saver is the one that has the largest chance of making it onto your system. The others may not. Auto Green is one that even requires additional hardware to work; so I am not sure why it is even included as a “feature”. The Smart 6 feature is fun to play with at first, but it  is not something that most people would worry about especially at the market space the H55N-USB3 seems to be aimed at.

Floor Mats
@BIOS
Q-Flash
Download Center
Xpress Install
Q-Share
These “features” are ones that we would expect on any motherboard from Gigabyte. They are nice, but would not really influence your decision.