GIGABYTE GA-H55M-USB3 (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

The Gigabyte H55M-USB3 is one of the best H55 boards money can buy. At retail price of $100, the board adds the RAID 0 and 1 capability, making it even more appealing. In addition, we are glad to see the inclusion of USB 3.0, DisplayPort, and HDMI on the board. Despite a layout issues, the board has plenty of excellent features that make it one of the best boards for budget buyers.

We simply can’t believe that this motherboard costs only USD 110 in the United States! It brings tons of features only found on more expensive models, like the USB 3.0 ports, four video connectors (VGA, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort) and professional-grade audio codec, making this motherboard the perfect pick if you are building a PC with integrated video for a “home theater PC” (HTPC) and/or professionally editing audio and video. Plus we have the outstanding overall construction quality, with only solid caps, ferrite chokes, low RDS(on) transistors and 2 oz. (56 g) copper tracks.

I am not sure if we have ever given a Micro ATX board a Gold Editor's award before, but we think this one is an award winner considering its feature set, value, tremendous overclocking ability, and stability under heavy stress. Even if you are not looking to build and HTPC, you can purchase the Gigabyte H55M-USB3 and brand new Core i5-750 processor at Newegg for $300 and easily overclock it to the mid-3GHz and get a solid four core gaming machine when combined with a good graphics card. You can go the i5-650 Clarkdale route too for less than $190, and get a dual core machine that will supply you 1080P easily for your HTPC or desktop needs.

Gigabyte were already on the F3 BIOS releases when the H55M-USB3 touched down in our test labs. We flashed over to that BIOS straight away expecting good all-round functionality. We hit a snag pretty quickly though, finding that setting SATA ports to AHCI mode for the Intel H55 PCH resulting in our DVD drive failing to be recognized as a valid boot device unless all ports were set to IDE.

Our tests showed that Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3 and GA-H57M-USB3 mainboards are very good products in many respects. We really liked them even before we ran the first tests, namely, upon close examination of their PCB layout and features. They didn’t disappoint us during CPU and memory overclocking.

Intel’s integrated graphics have improved dramatically with the release of the GMA HD on the CPU die it is close to the same or better performance as the other solutions on the market. Of course AMD and NVIDIA have not released new integrated graphics chipsets for a while now (the 890G chipset is coming), but this sets the minimum bar just a little higher with support for DirectX 10.0 and OpenGL 2.1. Another consideration is support for DisplayPort, and HDMI as well as support for USB 3.0. GIGABYTE’s board is excellent feature-wise for an inexpensive board with support for USB 3.0, CrossfireX and DDR3-2200 memory. Performance is excellent on the board as well. H55 boards are priced under $100 giving you excellent systems at reasonable pricing.