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.
BIOS -BIOS is an acronym that stands for Basic Input/Output System. It is meant to control your product at a very low level. As of right now there are three regularly used BIOS formats (there are actually more than that but there are three common ones). These are the AMI (American Megatrends Incorporated), Award, and Phoenix. The H55N-USB3 (as most Gigabyte motherboards) uses a customized Award BIOS layout. For the tweaker or enthusiast the most visited pages will be under the MIT (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) heading. Here you can take stock of what your CPU can do, is doing and also adjust for what you want it to do.
Although the H55N-USB3 features MIT the pages there are some things that are missing. These absences come in the available voltage adjustments for the CPU and board in general. It was quite interesting to only have three options for voltage for the CPU (there was no PLL Voltage adjustment option). This could be an issue with higher end CPUs (especially ones with four cores and HT) I am not sure why GB would have left this out of the BIOS when it seems like the H55N-USB3 is aimed at more than the Clarkdale crowd. There are some hacks and tweaks out on the net (mostly by Hi Cookie) that can work around some of these limitations, but it would have been nice to see the option in the BIOS right off.
Of course there are many other things in the H55N-USB3 BIOS that you should visit (even if you are not interested in overclocking you CPU). The Advanced BIOS features page gives you all of the more mundane options such as the boot order, logo display options and the frame buffer (amount of shared memory) that you want to use for your Clarkdale IGP (if you are using one).
The integrated peripherals page has the controls for how your SATA controller will operate (AHCI etc), USB functions and a couple of Green/Smart LAN options. Power Management Setup has a couple of items that seem out of place. The HPET (High Precision Event Timer) as HPET is most commonly used for multimedia timing. It would not seem to have much to do with power management. It should be noted that we ran into some issues when this was enable during our overclocking tests. We also saw no difference using 32-bit or 64-bit modes.
In general the BIOS on the H55N-USB3 is functional but there are some gaps in its coverage. The voltage options are more limited than I would have liked to see, but again that could be due to a mixed message around this motherboard. The board appears to be aimed at the upper end of the mass market, but has leanings towards the enthusiast as well. It is more than a little confusing.
