Gigabyte (as we have told you) is working on remaking their image. They want to be known as a company that builds components for the enthusiast. They are, and have been, working very hard to reach this goal. Their Ultra Durable series of boards have received numerous awards and accolades from review sites and from people who have bought these boards. We have been fortunate enough to review a couple of these and have given you our thoughts on the GA-890FXA-UD7 and are working on a revised impression of the GA-P55A-UD7 as well. For now we are going to move from the big to the small. This is the H55N-UBS3 a Mini-ITX board that features the Intel H55 Express chipset, USB 3.0 and a few Gigabyte special features. Follow along as we dive into this $104.99 board and see if size does not matter.
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@BIOSQ-FlashDownload Center Xpress Install Q-ShareThese “features” are ones that we would expect on any motherboard from Gigabyte. They are nice, but would not really influence your decision.
