Foxconn H55MX-S Motherboard Review

Rating: 6.5.

With Sandy Bridge in a state of hiatus for the next couple of months, a specific sector of our audience may decide to opt for the previous-generation platform which is now thoroughly tried and tested.  These people are more likely to be building a media system which doesn’t require all the processing grunt that Sandy Bridge has to offer.

Foxconn have sent us their H55MX-S motherboard to test which features an Intel H55 chipset and adopts a compact Micro-ATX form factor.  Both of these features make it ideal for a mid-size HTPC as the Intel H55 chipset features integrated graphics and the Micro-ATX form factor provides a compromise between size and features.

Specification

Foxconn supply the H55MX-S in a standard style motherboard box which is sized to reflect the Micro-ATX form factor of the board inside.  The box is covered in a black livery which isn’t quite as eye-catching as some we’ve seen in the past but is attractive looking nonetheless.

Like most other motherboard manufacturers, Foxconn have decorated the top of the box with a number of logos and badges which advertise the main features of the motherboard packaging within.  On the reverse side of the box there is some further information about the board.

Inside the box we find all the bundled items under a cardboard piece in the base of the box supports the motherboard on top.  The bundle itself is reasonably plentiful, consisting of a quick-start guide, an in-depth manual, a driver CD, two 4-pin molex to SATA power connectors and two SATA cables.  As we would expect there is also a back panel I/O shield included.

Foxconn have chosen to use a dark blue PCB for the H55MX-S which is accompanied by dark blue memory slots and SATA ports.  We can't say this is one of the most attractive PCB designs we have seen.

This motherboard clearly isn’t designed with serious overclocking in mind as there aren’t any heat-sinks cooling the power regulation circuitry around the CPU sockets.  Like most larger boards, the CPU power connector is located in the top left corner of the board.

The Intel H55 chipset supports Intel’s HD graphics core, making the board perfect for those who don’t want to use a discrete graphics option.  This is what differentiates the H55 and P55 chipsets and makes this motherboard perfect for use in a compact HTPC chassis.  The Intel H55 chipset supports six SATA 3Gb/s ports and these are situated in the bottom right corner of the board.  Unfortunately, these aren’t angled perpendicular to the motherboard so it isn’t quite as easy to achieve a tidy build.

For those who do want to use a dedicated graphics card can make use of the yellow PCI Express x16 slot that is situated below the CPU socket.  This is accompanied by a single PCI Express x4 slot and two PCI slots so there is more than enough room for a TV Tuner and a decent sound card.  Bear in mind, though, that a dual-slot graphics card will block the PCI Express x4 slot which may restrict your choice of expansion devices.

Due to the size restrictions of the Micro ATX form factor, Foxconn have only been able to include two memory lanes to the right of the CPU socket.  But these should be more than enough for most users as it supports up to 8GB of DDR3 memory.  We can’t see many users opting for 8GB of RAM for a media system, though, as 4GB is more than enough for this specific environment.

The selection of back panel I/O connections is a little limited compared to most motherboards we’ve looked at recently but most of the basics are catered for.  Moving from left to right there is a PS/2 connector, two USB2.0 ports, a serial port, a DVI port, an HDMI port, four further USB2.0 ports, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, an optical S/PDIF connection and six 3.5mm audio connectors.  We can’t really see why Foxconn chose to include a serial connector though; we would have much preferred to see an eSATA connector or USB3.0 support instead.

We decided to use the Intel Core i5 750 processor for testing today as it’s perfect for use in a media system and overclocks well.  In our test rig, this is combined with a CoolIT Vantage A.L.C. which has more than enough cooling power to keep the chip at a reasonable temperature when overclocked.

Test System

Motherboard: Foxconn H55MX-S
CPU: Intel Core i5 750
Memory: Kingston 4GB (2x 2GB) DDR3
PSU: Antec 550W
Chassis: Enermax Hoplite
Graphics Card: HIS Radeon HD 5830 Turbo
Cooler: CoolIT Vantage A.L.C.
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Hard Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Super Pi Mod 1.5
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6
FRAPS Professional
Cinebench R10
Cinebench R11.5
VLC Media Player
KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4)
Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC

All the latest BIOS updates and WHQL drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Foxconn use an American Megatrends BIOS for the H55MX-S which is actually extremely lacking in configurable settings.  Those who hope to overclock the system will be sorely disappointed as the only option we are able to change is the multiplier which can only be adjusted downwards.

So to overclock the system we are forced to use the software utility that Foxconn include with the motherboard.  Like the Asus motherboards we looked at recently, this has an Auto OC function.  This didn't initially work on our system, causing the system to crash when it reached a base clock of 150Mhz.  The second time we tried it, it also crashed but, on resume, it recommended a base clock of 140MHz which was applied without any issue.

This increased the overall clock speed of the processor to 2.80GHz, only 140MHz away from the stock clock speed.  We tried overclocking the system manually but weren't able to achieve a higher overclock than the Auto OC function which is really quite poor considering we've managed 4.00GHz with this exact chip using the similar Gigabyte H55M-UD2 motherboard.

We've taken photographs of all the BIOS screens for those who are interested.  These are displayed below.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

This set of results are about what we would expect for an Intel i5-750 based system.  Unfortunately we couldn't achieve a meaningful overclock to improve the results further.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The 3DMark scores for this system are quite reasonable thanks, in part, to the HIS Radeon HD 5830 Turbo graphics card.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

We managed to achieve a 3.48x performance improvement between the single-core and multi-core tests which shows the worth of utilizing multiple threads when possible.

Super Pi is software that was designed for overclocking performance testing, it allows to test floating decimal point and mathematics performances of a processor. The test consists in calculating the part PI value with the CPU, the number being infinite.

We can select several lengths of calculations, from 16 KB to 32 MB and are using the modified 1.5 version and are running a 32MB calculation.

We've found that Intel based systems score a lot better in this test than AMD based systems in this test.  A score of 12 minutes and a second for an Intel based system is quite good considering the system is not overclocked.

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance so we used two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach.

These results are quite impressive but for high performance drives, having a SATA 6Gb/s connector would certainly be beneficial.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

We are using a 720P 1.1gb MKV file today at 43 minutes, 28 seconds in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple iPhone 4, a real world situation facing many people.  For our audio conversion tests, we are using a 15 track album from MP3 to M4A format.

Both of these tests showcase the CPU processing performance of the system and are impressive for an i5-based system.  It's a shame we couldn't achieve a decent overclock with this system as these scores would benefit greatly.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video.  In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play both 720P and 1080P MKV files while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

These results are quite impressive and show that this motherboard and CPU can handle 1080P content without breaking a sweat, making them perfect for a media system.

For as long as we can remember enthusiasts around the world have been keen to see how their systems perform with many commercially available benchmarks from such companies as Futuremark.

While these applications are extremely useful to a wide audience sometimes it can be helpful to focus on a ‘real world’ application which many of us use on an almost daily basis.

You can get the KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4) here. Please note lower times are better as this means less time is taken by the system to process the commands.

This test showcases the real world performance of this motherboard in conjunction with a mid-range Intel CPU.  These results are impressive and show how you can get decent performance in Photoshop without having to spend big bucks on a system.

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is a standalone compilation of the DLC episodes for Grand Theft Auto IV, containing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on one disc. It was released alongside the DLC release of The Ballad of Gay Tony on 29 October 2009 for the Xbox 360 and released on 13 April 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Playstation 3. It does not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play, nor is an Xbox Live or PSN account necessary (except for multiplayer).

The engine is still extremely demanding for this game – even now for the newest hardware. The latest version changes some of the rendering calls and is used partially within the latest Max Payne engine.  The settings we used to test this game are displayed in the screenshot below.

We weren't able to max out the graphics settings in this test as the HIS Radeon HD 5830 didn't have enough graphics memory.   But the results we achieved are great, with really good frame-rates maintained throughout the test.

The Foxconn H55MX-S has a decent feature set for a previous generation board, despite lacking USB3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s connectivity.  Those who are looking to build a media system shouldn't be put off by the lack of these two features, though, as SATA 3GB/s should provide enough bandwidth to max out transfer speeds with large storage drives and mid range SSDs.  For those who require USB3.0 connectivity, this can be easily added using an PCI Express expansion card.

The overclocking potential of this board is extremely poor thanks to the limited number of BIOS settings available.  There is a software utility that can be used for overclocking the system but this isn't really worthwhile as we were only able to achieve a paltry 140MHz overclock which won't yield much of a performance improvement.  This is the reason we didn't include any overclocked results for our testing and benchmarks today.

Due to the extremely limited overclocking potential, we would find it hard to recommend the Foxconn H55MX-S unless the price was very attractive.  It's not widely available online but there are a number of stores such as CCL who are asking £62 for the motherboard.  Considering you can buy the Gigabyte H55-M-UD2H motherboard for £63 at YOYOTech, we find it very difficult to recommend the Foxconn H55MX-S as the Gigabyte board has more RAM slots, better connectivity and a much more attractive design.

KitGuru says: A solid motherboard for those who don't plan to overclock but there are better competitor products out there for the same (or slightly less) amount of money.

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