Could Gigabyte’s H55M-USB3 be the Ultimate H55 Board?

As I mentioned in our news last Friday, we paid a visit to Gigabyte’s suite at the Venetian in Las Vegas a little over a week ago, and just as we expected, there were many, many motherboards on display. All that were there ranged between many different chipsets, but one that the company was obviously interested to talk about was its H55 line-up, which as you likely know by now, is required to take full advantage of Clarkdale with its integrated graphics. If you still haven’t read our Clarkdale article, you can do so here.

Currently, Gigabyte offers three H55 models to choose from, the H55M-USB3, H55M-UD2H and also the H55M-S2H. The model that the company was most keen to show off was the H55M-USB3, which you can see running in the photograph below. As the name suggests, it supports USB 3.0, and of the three boards mentioned above, it’s currently the only one, hence why Gigabyte is making it ultra-clear with the model name.

Of the company’s H55 boards, the H55M-USB3 could be considered the flagship, with all the bells and whistles. Unlike the other H55 boards we’ve taken a look at up to this point, this one features DisplayPort support, along with the others that we’d expect, DVI and HDMI. Other improvements over other H55 models we’ve looked at include additional S-ATA ports (7 onboard, 1 eSATA), two full PCI-E 16x slots for CrossFire X, and for those who refuse to let go, floppy and IDE connectors.

Things like overclocking are hard to predict without having a hands-on test with the board, but if the ASUS P7H55D-M EVO we took a look at during our Clarkdale launch article is anything to go by, H55 is hardly going to be limiting in that regard. If you’ll recall, we hit a 4.33GHz stable clock on ASUS’ board, so I’m hoping to see the same thing on Gigabyte’s H55M-USB3 when I receive a sample in the coming week.

In addition to all that’s mentioned above, this board features the wide-range of other Gigabyte motherboard technologies we’ve come to expect, such as Ultra Durable 3, Smart 6, DES2 power management, 3x USB power boost (for USB 3.0), the DualBIOS and more. In addition, though Intel’s H55 chipset doesn’t support AHCI or RAID by default, Gigabyte adds in the support with the help of a JMicron controller, so that you won’t have to go without.

I am not certain of the board’s pricing at this time, but I think it’s safe to say that we could expect it to be around the ~$120 mark. Stay tuned to the site as I hope to have our full review of the board posted in the weeks ahead.