Best H55 board?

[mosslack]

I have plans to buy new microATX board to use with a i5 750 CPU. Do the H55 boards work as well as the P55's? Also the case I have requires at least 3 USB headers, but could use a 4th one even better. It has a card reader, slide in external 2.5 inch hard drive as well as 3 front USB ports. Thanks for any advice.

 

[thelostswede]

They appear to work just fine judging by the posts we've had here, but there's of course no guarantee. You get fewer USB ports if you go with an H55 board (the chipset only supports 12 rather than 14 ports) just so you're aware of that.

 

[mosslack]

Thanks, what I would love to be able to do with one of these boards is to make my 6 display setup a reality. Does the onboard video connectors work (with supporting graphics enabled CPU of course), with Snow Leopard? Of course I would also need the dual PCIe slots filled with compatible cards for this as well.

 

[thelostswede]

No, there's no support at all and you wouldn't be able to mix graphics solutions from various providers in Snow Leopard, for that you'd have to use Windows 7.

Get yourself an ATX P55 boards with three x16 PCI Express slots and three cheap Nvidia cards and you can make it work.

Or you get something like this http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/

 

[mosslack]

Didn't realize the P55 boards were available with 3 PCIe slots, cool. I may check out the other solution as well for my other systems, thanks.

 

[thelostswede]

Sure, plenty of boards with three slots, but the first two will operate in x8 mode and the last in x4 mode, but it's good enough if you're not going to play games with it (for the third card that is).

 

[mosslack]

I had a hell of a time getting my present 3 monitor setup working with my GA-EP45-UD3P in Snow Leopard, so I can imagine the fun I would have with twice as many monitors. Mostly was a DSDT problem with the current setup, but I finally found one which worked, after I patched the audio.