Gadgetory

so I haven't looked at many EVGA boards lately but I thought why not so I'm gonna have a look today at the EVGA H 55 V this is an H 55 other word that means it's compatible with all core i3 Core i5 and core i7 processors on LGA 1156 so what that means though is that not all of the features are necessarily compatible with the processors so if you are running say for example a core i3 dual core processor you will be able to run onboard video if you're running a core i5 quad core or a core i7 on this particular motherboard the onboard video won't work you'll have to install an add-in graphics card so a little bit more on that shortly EVGA first of all includes a huge visual guide to your new motherboard I love these I think that they're a really nice touch they give you a full sized picture like actual sized picture of the motherboard where they label all of the important components and they also give you some quick instructions on how to do the various things you might have to do so you can see that the limo okay we're not gonna look at the picture for too long because obviously we have a real motherboard here that we could look at is good so once I get this opened up I will definitely have a closer look at all the different features next we find an i/o shield very fairly run as a mill I Oh shield next inside the box we find two black straight SATA cables so neither of these are right angle something to note about the EVGA SATA cables is one end features a lock and the other end has no lock so the locking end is intended to go into your motherboard they also include a molex to two SATA power connectors and these have a lock on them that's something I haven't seen before it's there's actually a little lever there to depress interesting yeah I've never seen that before then we have a USB pci bracket next we have a driver CD do not use it download the latest drivers off the EVGA website next we have the EVGA H 55v motherboard installation guide so installing the CPU the CPU fan the system memory the i/o shield and securing them of word into the system case they also cover all the power connectors you'll have to configure as well as the front panel connectors for things like the case power case reset all that kind of stuff let's get this board out and this is another one of my favorite things about eega boards I'm going to break the suspense in just a moment as soon as I get the board out of the bag this thing please read before CPU installation that is the funniest thing ever step one and step two and step three and step four so they actually give you all of the instructions to install your CPU in such a way that you cannot possibly even attempt it without reading the instructions so like all each 55 motherboards we've got support for dual channel ddr3 memory we have an LGA 1156 socket here they are I can't tell what brand of socket they're using so I guess we won't get too much further into that power connectors are in there almost optimal locations we've got the 24 pin here but the 4 pin is kind of in no-man's land all over here something to note though because this is a micro ATX motherboard the odds of it being a bad thing for the 4 pin power to be here are much less because many micro ATX cases don't actually have conventional layouts in terms of where the motherboard and the power supply goes so it's quite possible you won't run into any problems with that now there is one that is a bit of a problem I don't really like the layout of the SATA ports because the PCI Express connector here if you have a dual slot card is actually going to potentially cover these three ports and make it difficult to access them that said this is a fairly low-end board so if you're installing an adding graphics card you're probably not putting in a super high-end long one so for most people it's probably going to be a non-issue like I said before if SATA ports so we've got five here down at the bottom USB headers there are plenty there are one two three four USB headers and they're color-coded bright pink so that you can find them very easily next we've got to the chipset and the age 55 chips that obviously doesn't produce a whole lot of heat you've got this little tiny heatsink on it not a whole lot going on in I think next we've got expansion so you've got one legacy PCI slot one PCIe 1x slot one PCIe 4x slot and one pipe PCIe 16x graphic slot I wouldn't remind it seeing those switched around so that you can use a graphics card and the 4x slot but really there aren't too many adding cards that go into a 4x lot these days so I wouldn't worry too much about it this appears to be front panel audio and then I guess that pretty much does it for the top side of the board let me see if there's anything else noteworthy looks like this before there this is totally irrelevant and I don't know what it does but I've never seen one of these on a motherboard before that is all let's go around to the back panel so you've got two ps2 ports one for the mouse one for the keyboard and let's get a little bit more into this onboard video issue you've got a VGA port a DVI port and an HDMI port now unless you're using a core i3 or a Core i5 dual core and please note that I'm grouping in the Pentium dual core LGA 1156 with the core i3 LGA 1156 all of those feature onboard video on the CPU so that means that all it is is a pass-through from the CPUs onboard video to these ports so unless you're using a CPU with onboard video they're just dead ports for decoration you can plug something into them but they won't do anything next we have 4 USB ports that's not a lot of USB ports 4 for an aged 55 motherboard but I mean you can always use a hub it's not that big of a deal you've got a Gigabit Ethernet port one eSATA port that's really nice to see on such an entry-level board and then you've got 7.1 Audio thanks for checking out my quick unboxing and product overview of the EVGA h50 5v