Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3 mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Testing Methods

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra and Lavalys Everest, all of our benchmarks use real applications that give you a great idea of how well a product fares when performing the tasks you're likely to want it for.

We test with our own Media Benchmarks suite which can be downloaded so you can test your own system. It uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we put the board through two game tests and record the minimum and average frame rates.

Our benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase.

Test Setup:

Motherboards:

• Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3 (Intel H55)
  
• ECS H55H-I (Intel H55)
  
• Zotac H55-ITX WiFi (Intel H55)
  
• ASRock H55M Pro (Intel H55)
  
• Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H (Intel H55)
  
• Asus P7H57D-V Evo (Intel H57)
  
• Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 (Intel P55)
  
• Asus P7P55M (Intel P55)
  
• ASRock P55M Pro (Intel P55)
  
• Biostar TP55 (Intel P55)

Common Components:

• Intel Core i5-750 (45nm, 8MB L3 cache, 20x133MHz: 2.66GHz, Turbo Mode to 2.8GHz and Intel power saving states left at BIOS default settings)
  
• Intel Core i5-661 (32/45nm, 4MB L3 cache, 25x133MHz: 3.33GHz, Turbo Mode to 3.6GHz, HyperThreading an Intel power saving states left at BIOS default settings)
  
• 4GB DDR3 1,600MHz C8 at motherboard SPD settings
  
• Graphics Testing: ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.11 1TB SATA hard drive
  
• Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  
• ATI Catalyst 9.12 WHQL

We tested the H55 mini-ITX boards with an Intel Core i5-661 in addition to the Core i5-750 to demonstrate both its like-to-like performance compared with other P55/H55 motherboards, but also that both in fact overclock well with a Clarkdale CPU. We felt it unfair to the mini-ITX boards tested considering they are not designed with Lynnfield CPUs in mind, and it shows what kind of performance a highly overclocked dual buys in the mini-ITX boards compared to the other i5-750s in competing boards.

Overclocked Settings:

• Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3 - Intel Core i5-661 at 4.4GHz, 200MHz Base Clock, 22x multiplier, 1,600MHz DDR3 at 8-8-8-20-1T, HyperThreading Enabled.
  
• ECS H55H-I - Intel Core i5-661 at 4.25GHz, 170MHz Base Clock, 25x multiplier, 1,360MHz DDR3 at 8-9-9-24-1T, HyperThreading Enabled.
  
• Zotac H55-ITX WiFi - Intel Core i5-661 at 4.125GHz CPU, 165MHz Base Clock, 25x multiplier, 1650MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-1T, HyperThreading Enabled.
  
• ASRock H55M Pro - 3.2-3.36GHz, 160MHz Base Clock, 20-21x mulitplier, 1,600MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-74-1T.
  
• Asus P7H57D-V Evo - 4.13GHz CPU, 207MHz base clock, 20x multiplier, 1,656MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-74-1T, 3.32GHz CPU-Northbridge, 3.32GHz QPI.
  
• Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H: 4.1GHz CPU, 205MHz base clock, 20x multiplier, 1,6400MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 10-9-9-25-74-1T, 3.28GHz CPU-Northbridge, 3.28GHz QPI.