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H55M-USB3 experiences and mobo question




Hi Jack, great to read your very interesting posts on MB's!

I changed to H55M-USB3 about a year ago, and chose this MB because of the cpu-power circuit. I must say i was a bit disappointed in SQ. At that time i moved from a medieval Asus-AMD-K7 (Athlon thunderbird) which runned @800 MHz. This board had a few interesting features, like no onboard sound, no onboard lan, adjustable VGA signal strength, very detailed BIOS. I bypassed all caps with Sikorel/Wima combo's (see photo, as per your directions, thanks a lot!), which had great influence on SQ. Of course this board couldn't do CPlay and i did SoX-upsampling by hand. This was all aimed on learning and trying to squeeze everything possible out of this 1999-MB. As a preparation for building my "real" CMP2.

The change to H55M-USB3 gave a lot nice improvements (RAMspeed, headless-opportunity, Cplay, upsampling, lower powerconsumption / battery-opportunity).
But i had expected more in terms of SQ. SQ was only a little better than the Asus/K7 board.
Other experience:
- changing CPU-speed on the h55m makes a lot of difference (900 lots better than 1200),
- playing with two cores it seems to sound tiny better than 1 core; just a little more depth and headroom. How could that be possible? larger L2 cache?

I think the H55M-USB3 has good potential, but quiet a few needless noisy & powerconsuming chips have to be removed: IDE-chip, usb3-NEC, hdmi, dvi, sound, fan regulators. I think these chips overrule other improvements i did, for example on Juli@: just subtle improvements when linear psu-ing 5v and LifePo-ing 3,3v. Not the 'quantum leap' that other inmates describe. (MB has hybrid psu: linear+pico)

Since chip-removal is out of my league, and i don't need 192 KHz upsampling (88.2 is enough; my modded Benchmark-DAC1 upsamles to 176) i have a few questions:
1.
For going headless / 88.2 upsampling would it be possible / better to move to Atom?
Possible advantages:
- Asrock Atom D525 board, underclockable to 900 Mhz; fanless when underclocked
- simple design and few features (elegant)
- power consumption and -regulation is easier to control
- battery-power would be more simple
- removal of the two big regulators near CPU and battery-feeding (or replace the 78xx regs by lowdrop regulators)??
- not so many caps to bypass with Sikorel-Wima-combo
Possible disadvantage could be the small L2+L3 (1M+0M)




2.
Or should i stick to the h55m and try to cut the power-pins of the mentioned chips (and leave them on the board)?

Thanks in advance!

Douwe


Edits: 11/23/11
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