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.
The Box and Goodies -The H55N-USB3’s box is small in keeping with the small size of the Mini-ITX board inside. Despite this GB has managed to stuff all of the usual marketing information found on their much larger products into this smaller space. The overall effect is like someone shrank one of their larger boxes.
Inside the box the H55N is carefully nestled on top of a smaller box which contains all of the accessories. One of the first things that will jump to your eyes is a large warning label. This in reality is nothing more than a page saying that to use the onboard video outputs you have to use a CPU that contains an integrated graphics processor; something like the Core i5 661.
The other items included are a little puzzling. For some reason Gigabyte has included a PATA cable but there is not one built into the motherboard. Still the rest of the items are useful.
