While Intel has forced consumers to upgrade their motherboard with every new wave of CPUs since Skylake, Colorful apparently has a more cost-effective solution. Hardware leaker @momomo_us recently discovered that Colorful’s H310M-E V20 accepts four generations of Intel Core chips, spanning from Skylake to Coffee Lake Refresh.
The H310M-E V20 comes in a compact, micro-ATX form factor and, of course, features a LGA1151 CPU socket. Colorful only lists compatibility for Coffee Lake and Coffee Lake Refresh processors, but the the CPU-Z screenshots below show the H310M-E V20 working with with previous Kaby Lake and Skylake processors as well. This would make the H310M-E V20 the jack of all trades in the H310 motherboard world.
With the ample processor support aside, the H310M-E V20 isn’t the best motherboard you can buy when it comes to specs and is everything you’d expect from your typical budget H310 offering. The board only has two DDR4 RAM slots and supports DDR4-2666 memory modules. The motherboard lacks an M.2 port, and you’re restricted to four SATA III connectors for your hard drives and SSDs.
The expansion slot configuration on the H310M-E V20 is as basic as it gets. The motherboard supplies one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and one PCIe 2.0 x1 slot for housing graphics cards and other expansion cards.
The H310M-E V20 utilizes two third-party controllers. Thanks to the Realtek RTL8111H controller, the motherboard has a Gigabit Ethernet port. Additionally, the Realtek ALC662 audio codec provides a 6-channel audio experience through three 3.5mm audio jacks.
Connectivity options on the rear panel come down to two PS/2 ports, one HDMI port, one VGA port, two USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. Fortunately, the motherboard has one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 header, meaning you can have up to four more USB ports for connecting peripherals.