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Measuring just 244x180mm, the Gigabyte H81M-S2PV is a tiny microATX LGA1150 motherboard that uses Intel’s H81 chipset. It supports Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell Core processors, making it a best suited to a small home PC.
With its sensible layout, building on it is simple. Since space at a premium, there’s understandably not much room for expansion, but the H81M-S2PV still provides a good range. There’s one PCI-E x16 slot running at the full bandwidth, one PCI-E x1 slot for additional cards and two legacy PCI slots. Unsurprisingly, this means there’s no dual-graphics support, so this board will only be able to support a single graphics card.
This shouldn’t be a problem if you’re building a PC on a tight budget or aren’t interested in games. There are two SATA2 and two SATA3 ports, so you can use the faster ports for SSDs, using the slower ports for regular hard disks and optical drives. This is a limitation of the H81 chipset, but isn’t likely to be a serious limitation to most people.
The chipset also restricts how much RAM you can install, as its two DDR3 memory slots can only support a maximum capacity of 16GB at speeds of up to 1,600MHz. This means you won’t be able to install the fastest RAM, but with memory making the smallest amount of difference to system performance, it’s not too bad a restriction if you’re building a budget PC.
Ports are limited, but you still get two USB3 and two USB2 ports, with another four USB2 ports available through its internal headers, VGA and DVI-D display outputs, a serial port, two PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm audio jacks. It’s a shame there’s no HDMI port, but at least you can use both video outputs simultaneously if you have two displays.
We tested the H81M-S2PV with a Core i5-4670K and 4GB of DDR3 RAM running at 1600MHz. It didn’t perform quite as well as we expected, scoring 108 overall, which is four points behind our reference Haswell system. Fortunately, its intuitive UEFI BIOS is easy to use if you want to overclock your processor to increase its performance.
The Gigabyte H81M-S2PV isn’t as sophisticated as other small LGA1150 boards, but at this price it’s hard to begrudge its limitations too much. Its lack of expansion slots and SATA3 ports won’t suit everyone, but if all you’re looking to build is a simple PC with a single graphics card and one main SSD, the H81M-S2PV is decent choice.
