Budget Intel Socket 1155 Motherboards Review

In this post I am going to be briefly looking at some the cheapest socket 1155 motherboards that there is. Socket 1155 is the newest socket offering from the CPU giant Intel. It supports all of Intels latest CPU offerings including the 2nd generation of Intel's Core i7 CPU's. I am going to start by looking at the cheapest 1155 motherboard that eBuyer features on their website.

Biostar H61MGC- http://www.ebuyer.com/product/274290

The Biostar H61MGC is the cheapest 1155 motherboard that there currently is on sale. Priced at an amazing £39.60 ($63.82) This is clearly a Budget motherboard and is well worth a good look at when building a 1155 Setup. The motherboard it self has no real stand out features. It only has 2 RAM slots, It doesn't have a Legacy PCI slot or IDE plug. It only has one PCI-E x16 slot. However it does feature onboard graphics which has DVI output and VGA output this means that you could plug it into any monitor including HDMI ones by using a DVI to HDMI adapter.
The H61MGC does come with solid capacitors in the CPU VRM area which means that voltages to your new Core i3, i5 or i7 will be very smooth and well regulated. It supports a maximum power of 95w which is enough to power the i7 2600K, It can also support the cheaper Pentium offerings as well which shows this board can support both high speed expensive hardware as well as lower speed cheaper hardware. It only has SATA 2 however which is a bit of a let down, It most likely won't effect many people however as at the moment the only things that come close to maxing out the bandwidth of SATA 2 ports are SSD drives and not many people use them.
Overall the Biostar H61MGC is a very well priced offering from Biostar and I would recommend it to anyone that simply wants a computer that is good for high speed internet and also some light gaming if fitted with a graphics card.

MSI H61M-E33-B3 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/260862

The H61M-E33-B3 from MSI is a lot more of a rounded motherboard. It has more of the new features that the new Core series supports. It costs quite a bit more than the Biostar however priced at just over £50 ($80) Having looked at this motherboard the first thing that I noticed was the amount of high quality solid capacitors. This is a good sign as this usually means that the manufacture has not skimped on the quality part of this motherboard to gain extra specifications. The next thing I noticed is that it features a Legacy PCI slot as well as two PCI-E x1 and a PCI-E x16 slot as well. It only has 2 RAM slots like the Biostar but that can be expected at such a good price. It can support upto 16Gb of RAM if you can find the compatible 8Gb RAM sticks.
The H61-E33-B3 also only features SATA II which is a bit disappointing but it is a budget board and remember that not many people max out the bandwidth on SATA II anyway. It supports CPU's upto the i7-2600K just like the Biostar and can handle the slower cheaper Pentiums as well. This board also has a Native HDMI output as well which shows that it was built for HDMI output. I would say that this motherboard would be great paired with an i3 or i5 and put into a media center PC as it also features 8 channel audio output with the 6 needed sockets.
Over all the MSI H61M-E33-B3 looks like a great quality budget board with good features for an amazing price and I wouldn't hesitate to recommended it to anyone looking to build either a budget gaming PC or a Media Center PC.

ASUS P8H61-M - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/261401

The ASUS P8H61-M is the cheapest ASUS board that I could find for socket 1155. It does come with more features than the H61MGC and H61M-E33-B3 and that is to be expected as it costs just over £60 ($96) Having looked at the P8H61-M I noticed that the board is full of ASUS's well known quality, It has only Solid Capacitors, Anti-Surge protection which protects your hardware from Electrical surges, and C.P.R which ASUS claims to help recover the origional BIOS settings should an overclock fail and the board not boot. This sounds like a very useful feature for those people that are always trying to push their components for the best performance they can get.
The P8H61-M supports the same CPU's as the other two budget boards and also only features SATA II again just like the other boards. It has the same card expansion slots as the MSI H61M-E33-B3 and also features only 2 RAM slots. It also lacks the feature of USB 3 which is disappointing as well.
On the positive side this board does have a HDMI output and also a S/PDIF output which the MSI and Biostar are lacking. This shows that ASUS are aiming the P8H61-M at the Media market as S/PDIF is a Digital audio out plug which is the best way to transmit HD audio.
Overall the ASUS P8H61-M seems to be aimed at the media market again but there is no doubt in my mind that a board of this quality couldn't easily handle some gaming work as well so long as it is fitted with either a i5 or i7 processor and a decent graphics card. Who ever said budget gaming was a bad idea?

Gigabyte GA-H61M-D2-B3 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/261350

My final board is the Gigabyte GA-H61M-D2-B3. This board is the same price as the ASUS and for that I would expect the same sort of features as well. The first thing I notice about this board is the 2 RAM slots. Once again another board that can only have 2 RAM sticks in it. The next thing I notice is the CPU VRM area. It is packed with high quality chokes and capacitors and also features Lower RDS mosfets lowering the power usage and heat output than standard VRM's. The final thing that stands out on this board is the fact that there is no legacy PCI slot, only 3 PCI-E x1 slots which I think may cause some people to shy away from this board as many PCI-E x1 cards a more expensive than PCI cards that offer the same features.
The GA-H61M-D2 also supports the same CPU's as the Biostar, MSI and the ASUS and can support the whole range from the Pentiums to the i7's. What I don't understand with this board is that they haven't included a HDMI output which is very disappointing, They also haven't included the full 6 3.5mm sockets that is usually required when usinging 7.1 audio.
The GA-H61M-D2 also only supports SATA II and USB 2.0 which is also quite disappointing considering they haven't got a HDMI port either.
My overall descision with the GA-H61M-D2 board is that I don't know what audience Gigabyte was aiming this board at. It can't do proper multimedia as it doesn't have a HDMI socket and it also doesn't feature S/PDIF audio output. The quality of the VRM is better than the ASUS's but personally I wouldn't buy it over the ASUS as it seems that it is just lacking features and for the same price it is not worth it.

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