Foxconn H55MX-S review

The H55MX-S is one of Foxconn’s cheapest LGA1156 motherboards. It has a better range of back panel ports than many similarly priced motherboards, but we were immediately sceptical about its layout. It has just two memory slots, so can only take a maximum of 8GB RAM. There’s also no BIOS support for memory speeds above 1,333MHz and Foxconn’s supplied ONE overclocking software only provides a limited range of automated options. Support for CPU overclocking is also virtually non-existent.

The H55MX-S has two PCI slots and one PCI-E x16 slot. A PCI-E x4 slot immediately below it that will be blocked by any graphics card with a large cooler. Worse still, installing a large graphics card will also block two of the six SATA ports, which is a problem if you want both a decent graphics card and multiple optical or hard drives. The motherboard also has three USB headers which can be used to connect up to six extra ports, but that’s about it as far as useful extra features go.

We were bemused by the serial port on the back panel – we certainly haven’t needed one in several years. Six USB ports and a PS/2 port are rather more useful, as are six analogue 3.5mm audio outputs and an optical S/PDIF out port. There’s also a full set of VGA, DVI and HDMI connectors for the graphics processor integrated into most of Intel’s LGA1156 processors.

The H55MX-S works well enough – it even got an excellent Overall score of 132 in our tests – but we can’t fathom the logic behind some of Foxconn’s feature and layout choices. Even if you’re building a media centre PC that will never require any overclocking, extra memory or more than four SATA devices, there are still less compromised motherboards available for the same price, the Asus P7H55 for example.