GA-H170N-WIFI LGA1151 Motherboard

[PhiPhi]

I purchased this board as it was the only ITX motherboard readily available at my local stores that had 6 onboard SATA connectors so it seemed like a good basis for building my home unRAID system.

 

GA-H170N-WIFI Specs.

• Intel H170 Express Chipset
  2 x DDR4 DIMM sockets supports up to 2133MHz memory modules
  1 x DVI-D port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920x1200@60 Hz
  2 x HDMI ports, supporting a maximum resolution of 4096x2160@24 Hz r HDMI 1.4 Maximum shared memory of 512 MB
  1 x Realtek ALC1150 codec
  2 x Intel GbE LAN chips (10/100/1000 Mbit)
  1 x Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, supporting 2.4/5 GHz Dual-Band / BLUETOOTH 4.2, 4.1, BLE, 4.0, 3.0, 2.1+EDR
  1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCI-e 3.0)
  1 x M.2 Socket 1 connector for the wireless communication module (M2_WIFI)
  1 x M.2 Socket 3 connector on the back of the motherboard
  2 x SATA Express connectors
  6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors
  2 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports available through the internal USB header
  6 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports (4 ports on the back panel, 2 ports available through the internal USB header)
  1 x USB Type-C™ port on the back panel, with USB 3.0 support
  
• 
  

 

I selected the cheapest processor I could find, an i3 6100 with 2 cores and 2 hyper-threads, 3 WD 2TB NAS drives, 1WD 1TB Black, and 2 old 160GB 2.5" drives I had hanging around to use as cache drives.  For memory I used a set of F4-2400C15D-16GRR - G.Skill for 16GB total RAM. For my VGA card as I was hoping to do some gaming was an old 2GB Radeon HD 260X card, the final item I used was a Thermaltake Bronze 80% 500w power supply.

 

The build was not easy as I first thought as the Bitfinex Prodigy case I used needed to be reconfigured to accommodate the VGA card and owing to the location of 4 of the SATA ports I had to dig around in my box of bits to find 2 more SATA cables which have a sightly shorter connector as only 2 were supplied with the mainboard, apart from that given the form factor I had no issues with the motherboard layout.

 

The UEFI bios is straight forward and it was easy to find the visualization settings and set the USB as default boot drive though I must admit I do prefer the old style bios interfaces.

 

unRAID booted up and detected everything without a hitch and has been stable for about a week, I have set up a Windows 8.1 Pro VM allocated 3 or the 4 available cores and 8GB of RAM and am now enjoying playing Fallout 4 on my ancient living room plasma at 720p.  The only issue I had was that the MB defaulted to using the PCI-e graphics card as primary display and I had to manually set the internal cpu 530 as the default graphics device.

 

I'm very happy with with the motherboard for the price, it's just a shame that I can't seem to get the Bluetooth working in the Windows VM or utilise the 2nd GBE NIC and wireless ac adaptor.  The only problem for me is that getting a decent amount of cpu cores to run lot's of VM's and dockers is expensive (I7 6700) vs the AMD FX cpu's although the Intel offerings are impressive regarding performance and low power draw.

[madmanmike]

Sweet! This is the board I am about to buy and I am thrilled to see someone else has had mostly success using it.

 

 

I, too, am bummed to read that you haven't gotten the BT nor the 2nd NIC to work, but maybe that will be worked out.

 

 

Thanks for posting!

Michael

[PhiPhi]

@madmanmike The Bluetooth is detected but device won't start with native Windows drivers so you might have some luck with the Gigabyte drivers.  I don't really need Bluetooth so I didn't bother myself.