Replacement for Foxconn H55M socket 1156 LGA?

dabozuk

dabozuk

dabozuk

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I've got an old i5 PC that serves as the households second gaming rig:
  • Foxconn H55M-S (socket 1156 LGA)
  • i5 640 3.2GHz
  • 8GB RAM DDR3 (2 x 2GB PC3-10600 1333MHz, 1 x 4GB PC3-12800 1600MHz)
  • AMD Radeon 7870 Tahiti LE
  • Samsung 840 Pro SSD (wasted as the mobo is only SATA1 no AHCI!)
I'm looking for recommendations for better mobos that will unlock the potential of the SSD, because application and game load times very slow compared to my primary Skylake gaming rig with a similar SSD.

Obviously the socket must be the same, preferably take the same RAM, and work well with Windows 10.

Cheers
 
That motherboard does have sata II so the ssd should be fine. It won't be hitting max speed but there is little noticeable difference between sata II and sata III unless benching anyway. I find it hard to understand why Foxxconn has built a motherboard from that era that doesn't have AHCI as a option seeing as boards going way back to socket 775 had it. A look through the manual reveals that they only gave it IDE mode. Madness!! There is good news though as it was added in a later bios, release A21F1P04. The very latest version is A21F1P05 so you may as well download and install that one. You can get it from here. Hopefully that should give you a bit of a boost.

As for replacing the board you would need to upgrade everything. Some socket 1156 boards came with so called sata III controllers but they were the awful Marvell controller which was actually slower than the onboard Intel Sata II controller (trust me I had one of these boards, Asus P7P55D-E Pro and ended up going back to the Intel Sata II controller). Sata III never arrived properly until socket 1155 came along.
 
Thanks for the info. Yeah I looked at that BIOS version, but there's no information on how to flash it and the download has no readme. There's some FOX LiveUpdate and ONE software, but that doesn't work on Windows 10 it would seem. Also I've seen some threads where people have bricked their CMOS on this board flashing the BIOS. So I'm kinda hesitant. I'll see if I can get that FOX software working in Win 7 compat mode (manual says it runs Win 7).

I was hoping to pick up a second hand replacement mobo that's just generally a better.

Also, is it possible to get a PCI board with SATA III controller and do it that way?

Cheers for the help.
 
Looking at you manual the only way that I can see to update the bios is with the Fox Live Update software so if you can't get that to run with W10 then you are probably out of luck. Saying that, there is a chance that it will work with W10 as I have only come across a couple of pieces of software that doesn't work with W10 so far.

Most if not all of the cheap ones use the terrible Marvell controller too so you are no better going down that route. There are no boards on socket 1156 that have native Sata III support. All the ones that state they have sata III uses the Marvell controller. The only way you are going to get full speed Sata III is to upgrade the motherboard/cpu and also the ram if moving to Skylake.

I have to say though that in normal day to day use you will not notice much, if any difference between Sata II and Sata III.
 
Ok ta. The LiveUpdate application just won't launch, but I'll have a fiddle with it later tonight.

So maybe there's something else going on with my PC then. It's a fresh reinstall of Windows 10 on the 840 Pro SSD, so it should be (and was!) quick, but it really isn't now. I've installed the Samsung Magician software (despite broken links on their site!) and it shows really bad benchmark stats.

Games run fine in this system (the 7870 LE is an awesome budget card) but Windows is generally really sluggish - painfully slow desktop icon loading after login, slow launch of apps and games etc, and after downloading a file in Chrome it sits at 100% for up to 10 seconds before actually letting me open the file.

I'll try and do some benchmarks, have you got any good suggestions for benchmark apps to reveal what might be going on? Also, is it ok for me to carry on this performance investigation discussion in this thread, or should I be posting elsewhere?

Cheers
 
Uh, and it looks like I have found one of those rare programs that won't run on Windows 10 - the Foxconn LiveUpdate utility. It won't run in Win 7 compat mode with admin.
 
Your foxconn motherboard has sata 2 ports so that why your results are low, your works pc has sata 3 ports and also you have rapid mode enabled in Samsung magician.
 
Agreed. If I were able to enable AHCI, would that make a difference? Samsung Magician says it can't enable rapid mode without AHCI.
 
Your score on your H55 board are about as much as you are going to get with a sata II controller and similar to my old laptop which I fitted with a ssd. You are not going to get any better than that without upgrading to a newer platform. You can't really compare performance to a Skylake based pc as everything is much faster.

Do you have a spare ssd or hdd lying around? If you do can you install windows 7 (or any other version even) just so that you can update the bios? You will get AHCI then.
 
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