14 DAY TRIAL // Motherboards that incorporate the latest technologies usually come in reasonably large form factors and end up in spacious, colorful gaming systems or enthusiast configurations. However, there are still those human beings that like to put as much horsepower as they can inside smaller systems, such as LAN party rigs or HTPCs. To appease such consumers, motherboard makers came up with the micro-ATX and mini-ITX form factors. Now, Gigabyte has completed development of a motherboard based on the latter, known as the GA-H55N-USB3.
Colored blue, like all Gigabyte mainboards, the platform is powered, as its name implies, by the Intel H55 chipset and, thus, can be paired with socket LGA 1156 central processing units. The other part of the name obviously refers to the support for the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard (two ports, to be exact) that the hardware maker implemented. In fact, the board is said to be the 'world's first' mini-ITX board to boast this technology.
Fast external storage transfer rates aren't all the motherboard supplier has to offer, of course. The GA-H55N-USB3 features the Ultra Durable 3 design, Dynamic Energy Saver 2 (which reduces power consumption), a 2oz copper PCB and all the other 'regular' specs. The list includes a PCI Express x 16 slot for graphics, a pair of DDR3-1666 memory slots, an eSATA connector, four SATA 3.0Gbps ports, Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 channel audio. Finally, for communication with video output devices, Gigabyte threw in D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs.
The platform is compatible with Windows 7 and boasts the DualBIOS technology. Though the official announcement was quite explicit when it came to the feature set, there was no mention of a price. Still, it shouldn't be long before this new product makes it to stores, which means this final piece of information will surface soon enough.