Good review, and interesting board for sure. Can't wait until these get 6.0Gbps SATA. A nice SSD (next gen intel perhaps), an ATI GFX card and a silent PSU and you have yourself a low(ish) power - high functioning rig.



Made me lol btw. Nice work.


Adam

The VRM temperatures are a little surprising. Those are easily some of the largest VRM heatsinks I've seen on a mITX board, so being the hottest board is strange. Must be all of that overvolting the board is doing.

Yeah, I guess the IGP would only be used for linux people, so its unusual power usage shouldnt be a problem for most using this thing.

it is a sweet gaming machine. the built in N, the sata ports, very nice.

The over voltage is a bit peculiar. I bet this sucker can overclock. this this screams for a 750 and oc it, coupling with a 5870.

Question: does the pci express x16 slot accept any cards besides graphics cards? (such as TV tuners) My experience with two other H55 boards (including the earlier Zotac model) tells me that non-graphics cards are not supported, which is a bummer.

this would be news to me. depressing news!

never thought about it. I have pci cards I am goign to change in my next 6-core amd build... would be bad if they didnt fit the 8x and 16x slot. Physically, they should fit, but it wont recognize? what version of windows?

It does support PCI Express x1 cards, you have to go into the BIOS and force PCI Express Gen1 mode before installing a card.

We put up a blog post about it here - http://switch.zotac.com/index.php?optio ... 13&lang=en

This board looks very promising. Too bad I just upgraded my HTPC case or I would have happily gone with this option. Pairing this with a SFF Lian Li, PicoPSU/Winmate, Core i3, Blu Ray drive, and an Ati 5450 and you would have a great portable HTPC option.

Yikes! How many CPUs did you fry for this review? (Yeah, yeah, I know it's a typo...)

ugh... i have been looking at this board, and the A-E version before it. so much potential... i just couldn't get over the lack of undervolting, and countless reports of poor tech support.

Thanks for the review, especially the comments on heatsink fit (Big/Shuriken). The undervolting restrictions and high GPU voltage are major dissapointments as well. You guys nail all the points that I'm interested in when you do your mobo reviews- kudos!

I hope Gigabyte will send you their H55N-USB3 for review, hopefully that one will get the basics right. I can live without the extra SATA ports and WiFi.

The CPU placement is problematic for cooling. I have the older A-E in a Silverstone Sugo SG05, and the presence of the HD5770 causes core temp during Prime95 to go form about 65/60 up to 75 and up (it hit 80 before I cleaned up the cabling slightly stopped gaping long enough to stop the test).

Disabling HT seems to help keep the temp under control.

CPU is using the stock Intel cooler

a strong performance and configuration Mini ITX, but we know Mini ITX mostly use Atom and ION platform, and ION platform suppor HD 1080P, I do wanna know the temperature with such high configuratino in Mini ITX moterboard in a Mini ITX case.

Good luck with that I also purchased this board and had serious BIOS issues like overvolting similar to yours. Here is my experience:

[quote]Then at CES this year, Zotac announced plans to release a new mini-ITX board based around the LGA1156 socket for Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs. I was drooling on my keyboard when images first hit the net. Was this going to be the answer to our questions, on paper it was just about perfect. Quad core support? Check. Dual channel DDR3 with regular sized DIMMs? Check. PCIe slot? Check. Onboard wi-fi N? Check! So, as soon as they were released, I had two on their way to me.

This is not a review of the Zotac board though, the H55ITX served me for about four months in my HTPC, and while it never impressed me, it worked in the Antec HTPC case I had, and 65W seemed plenty. The system was stable, and my HTPC was working well for the first time in years. I finally got around to putting the second board into a SFF gaming PC about six weeks ago. This machine I built with the intention of overclocking…whoops! Things went sour shortly after first power up. I’ll go into really brief detail.

Actually, the very first time I booted the first board, I thought it quite odd that there was a message at the bottom of the post screen stating “FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLYâ€

I've ordered this motherboard ahead of reading this review (Google did not pick it up immediately). Now I'm concerned a bit by high power consumption. I really hope Zotac will address this issue as soon as possible.

I plan to use this motherboard for HTPC use in the following setup:

Case: Silverstone Sugo SG05B
Motherboard: ZOTAC H55ITX-C-E
CPU: Intel Core i3-540
RAM: Patriot Sector 5 PVV34G1333LLK 4GB
SSD: OCZ Vertex 2 Extended 60Gb
HDD: Western Digital WD20EARS
DVDRW: LITE-ON 8X Slot Loading DVDRW

I've just received my last parts today so will try assemble it over the weekend and measure power consumption with Kill-A-Watt. Plan to use with XBMC on Linux and sometimes Windows 7 Ultimate. What really attracted me with this motherboard is that it had WiFi built-in and 6 sata ports, so I can use it some time in the future (in case I will want to upgrade my HTPC) as a home server motherboard. I will see how Intel's GMA HD performs but I'm waiting for NVIDIA GF108 chips to come out and may be use it as a dedicated graphics card.

What's GF108?
Is that a new series succeeding the low-power GT2xx range that came out last year?

It is new entry level Geforce 400 (Fermi) chip model. There is almost no information about this generation still, but people say it is coming soon.

Sweet,
I'm building a similar platform (more varied functions) but on an ATX mobo.
I also intend to muck around with IntelHD...

But if it's too limited in GNU/Linux, then I too will migrate to a discrete.
I had planned to get a GT220, but I may hold out for this nextgen stuff!

I'll "keep my ears peeled", thanks.

The 300W PSU in the SUGO is plenty....if that was your concern, don't worry. If your concern is the power bill, then I understand

My concern is temperature and noise. I want fan to spin as slow as possible and due to CPU being as cold as possible. Right now the case fan is connected to SYS fan connector on the motherboard and it is running pretty loud (well, I can hear air work through the case and it is not "silent").
Also stock CPU fan while not loud is spinning at 2000rpm.

Temperatures are high I think as well even with those fan speeds - room temperature is 24-25 and I'm getting 39C in IDLE and 55-62 while busy with whatever Boxee was busy with. Take into account that I undervolted CPU and IGP by -0.1.

You mentioned in the article that the board supports Wake-on features? Any idea on this includes Wake-on-LAN (WOL)?

I have this board in front of me now and cannot find any references to this in the BIOS... :-/

I read in the reviews on NewEgg that the board actually only supports 6 SATA if you run them with the BIOS RAID. If you want JBOD then you only get 3 drives, and there are apparently serious issues with simultaneously accessing them from Linux, too. Can someone who has this board confirm this? If so, that's too bad, then there's apparently no mini-ITX boards that can do 6 "real" drives.

Has the new C-E revision of this board fixed the problems people were having with failed BIOS updates bricking their board and the motherboard not waking up from sleep mode (S3)?

I'd like free wireless N, but not at the cost of not being able to sleep the computer or bricking the board on BIOS update.

I was able to update to the latest bios without any issues.
Computer falls asleep and wakes up fine under Windows 7, however does not work under XBMC Live 10 (still not sure why).
One issue so far, most likely unrelated to motherboard is that crappy Western Digital WD20EARS disk does not wake up
after sleep. Also detection of this disk during POST takes what it seems like forever.