ECS is also making a mini-ITX H55 motherboard

Hot on the heels of the awesome mini-ITX board by Zotac and DFI and Gigabyte's recent announcement to follow suit, ECS is also planning to dive into the small form factor arena with a similar H55 board.

Dubbed the H55H-I, the board features a decent mix of four SATA plus one eSATA port, a pair of DDR3 slots, a full 16x PCI-E slot, HDMI and DVI outputs, Gigabit Ethernet and both types of S/PDIF outputs in addition to the usual 7.1 channel HD audio - so good for a HTPC and upgradable.

There's no WiFi like the Zotac board offers, nor is there USB 3 like the Gigabyte, but the benefit of this board is that it should be much cheaper than them both. The downside is that it's 4+1 phase power is designed for sub-85W Clarkdale CPUs only: Lynnfield CPUs do fit, but ECS explained they are certainly not recommended. That said, the board does feature some form of overclocking, which seems more than a little oxymoronic.

We're due one in the bit-tech lab come Monday for testing in the coming weeks in a head to head against Gigabyte's H55 mini-ITX! It'll be interesting to see if a budget ECS board is good enough, or if Gigabyte engineering is the better buy.

Are you in the market for a mini-ITX board? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.