Installing the Motherboard
I have recently purchased Gigabyte h55m-ud2h motherboard as part of an upgrade kit. First of all the motherboard came with only 2 cables ( IDE, SATA ) so if I wouldn’t have cables like this lying around I wouldn’t have been able to connect my 3 SATA disks. I do not know if this is because it was part of the upgrade kit or the motherboard comes with these 2 cables by default but it is nowhere near sufficent.
The motherboard is very compact, needless to say that I couldn’t properly fit it to my 5 year old large chassis. The holes on the chassis simply were not on the right place for this motherboard… I managed to fit most of the screws though apart from those at the far end of the motherboard. So I had to be extra careful when I installed the memory modules not to break the motherboard. Apart from this problem and that I didn’t find my screwdriver kit for a while 🙂 it was very easy to install.
The Motherboard has the following built in stuff:
Built in Audio
Proper drivers for Windows 7 64bit
Detected by Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10 OK
Built in VGA H55 ( jaysus!!! )
This has been advertised as some superfast video. Well folks .. to put it mildly it is dreadful. Terrible graphics performance, and very ugly rendering. You definitely will need an additional video card if you plan to play games on it. Even World of Warcraft is terribly flickery so I had to set the graphics option way back.
The most annoying thing is that I wasn’t able to video card I have integrated and in fact I haven’t been able to determine it until I installed the drivers that came with the motherbord installation cd.
The videocard shows up in the windows device manager as: Intel (R) Graphics Media Accelerator HD
This actually not saying much, no model number or anything so it will be a bit of a w*nk to get the latest drivers downloaded 🙂
Video Driver Windows 7 64 Bit
The video driver is OK for windows
Video Driver Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10
Update: The driver works perfectly on 10.04 LTS and it installs automatically
Now this is a problem. When I started up Ubuntu 9.04 it didn’t recognize the video and to add a bit more drama to the situation the screen was shifted left on the monitor. I spend numerous hours trying to fix this problem but I never got to fix it on this Ubuntu version.
I tried to remove the previous Nvidia drivers – No Luck
I tried to download new intel drivers – Was already the latest
Upgraded to Kernel 2.6.30 as explained here – No Luck
Finally I decided to stop trying as I read on some forums that Ubuntu 9.10 is running fine this videocard so I kicked off an upgrade.. which to be honest with you was one of the smoothest operating system upgrade I ever had. Needless to say that it wasn’t working correctly on 9.10 neither. In fact the operating system did hang right after login.
Upgraded the kernel to the latest which is 2.6.32 at the time of writing but this again didn’t solve anything it was hanging after log in like kernel 2.6.31.
The lucky thing was that the kernel 2.6.30 was still installed and was working even though the screen was shifted. I logged in to it and removed any trace of any Nvidia product installed over Ubuntu.
After a restart all 3 installed kernels started to work but the sceen was shifted for all of them.. that was better than not being able to log in at all. I have defined the third party auto upgrade option found here then reinstalled some Nvidia stuff ( I was all over the place so I haven’t a clue which ones ) and voila it started to work on kernel 2.6.31, 32… the 2D part 3D part still doesn’t work. As I am not using Ubuntu for gaming at all I decided not to bother with fixing the 3D any longer.
Built in LAN
Detected by Windows 7 OK
Detected by Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10 OK
The bios menu is generally good apart from the fact that I do not see any option to disable the built in VGA… well I hope when I get myself a proper graphics card it will not interfere with it.
The other thing is if you want to boot from an USB key it detects it as a hard drive so when you go to the boot menu and select from the numerous USB options (USB Disk, USB FDA, etc ) none of them will be your USB key. To fix this just go to the Bios and select the USB key from the Hard Drive Priority option ( needs more exact explanation ).
To summarize my experience with h55m-ud2h well after spending a few days on fixing the above errors it works all right. If you have a bunch of cables already you can go ahead and buy it… but do not forget to get a proper graphics card.