Intel DH87RL Haswell H87

For those Linux desktop users in the market for a micro-ATX motherboard for use with the latest-generation Haswell processors, the Intel DH87RL motherboard costs a little more than $100 USD and gets along mostly well with modern Linux distributions.

The Intel DH87RL motherboard has already been used in dozens of Haswell Linux benchmark articles on Phoronix in the past nearly two months since the Haswell debut, so this article will be short and to the point. I have been testing the Intel DH87RL motherboard under Linux since May when receiving my first engineering sample of the Core i7 4770K CPU. When receiving the early Haswell sample from Intel I hadn't yet received any other Haswell-compatible motherboard review samples from other motherboard vendors or Intel themselves. At the time it was only the DH87RL that was in stock and available for sale online prior to the Haswell public launch, so I had purchased this Intel micro-ATX motherboard.

The experience with the Intel DH87RL is mostly pleasant and similar to other Haswell-compatible motherboards I since have my hands on. If using Ubuntu 13.04, Fedora 19, or the upcoming Ubuntu 13.10 Linux release (and desktop Linux distributions of similar age), you should be in mostly good shape. For more details see the assessing the current Haswell Linux experience article I wrote at the end of June. Obviously, the newer the Linux kernel and other key components, the better. A bleeding edge Linux stack is especially good if using the open-source Intel Mesa graphics driver and wishing to obtain maximum performance. As a warning though if planning to use the current Ubuntu Long-Term Support release, Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS doesn't play too nicely. If using Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS the SATA controller will go undetected and thus be unable to locate any disks, but that's a mater of the H87 chipset being supported by that kernel release and is not specific to only this motherboard.

The DH87RL has already been covered at length within different Phoronix articles where you can see plenty of benchmark results, but otherwise search for DH87RL on OpenBenchmarking.org to see various other Haswell Linux performance results.

The only two other Linux compatibility issues I have run into with the Intel DH87RL is that LM-Sensors is unable to find any hardware sensors to monitor for this motherboard (besides the CPU thermal sensors) and there's an ACPI issue when attempting to shutdown the system. LM_Sensors on recent Linux kernel releases is unable to find any of the voltage/thermal/fan sensors for the DH87RL motherboard itself. The only other problem, which is a nuisance rather than show-stopping issue is that when going to power off the system on Linux, the system simply reboots rather than turning off. This poweroff/reboot issue is still present as of the latest Linux 3.11 kernel Git code.

Overall, the Intel DH87RL motherboard continues to run nicely with Linux and the Core i7 4770K CPU it's been tested against. The H87 micro-ATX motherboard also costs only $110 USD, which is easy on the wallet compared to some of the other Haswell motherboards. This Intel H87 motherboard has two DDR3-1600/1333 DIMM sockets, VGA and DVI connectors for Intel HD graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, six USB 3.0 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, six Serial ATA 3.0 ports, one PCI Express x16 slot, and three PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots.