Performance Analysis

At stock speeds with the same Core i5-750 as other motherboards the Zotac performance is not great. It sits at or close to the bottom of our table in all our real world benchmarks. Crysis performance was mid-table for the Zotac, but it lost that edge in STALKER. Overclocking the Core i5-661 did yield a reasonable performance increase for the Zotac, compared to the stock-speed scores of the Core i7-750, but the difference in CPU architecture meant that the memory bandwidth was significantly lower with the Clarkdate CPU installed, and latency was higher.

While we accept to some degree smaller boards make compromises, the DFI MI-P55 T36 had appreciably better results compared to full ATX boards. The Zotac is merely fast enough rather than all-out fast.

Power Consumption

The graphs above show the non-overclocked power draw for the Core i5-661 and Core i5-750, and clearly the performance difference for Clarkdale is offset by the drop in power consumption. Even with the same Core i5-750 Lynnfield CPU as was tested in the other boards, the Zotac saved a considerable amount of power: 20W at idle!

Unfortunately, this saving cannot be further tweaked: we tried Kingston 1.35V LoVo DDR3 and could not lower the voltages in the BIOS at all. We didn't know what voltage had been set either, such are the limitations of the BIOS. Trying to undervolt the Core i5-661 CPU didn't work, despite disabling Turbo Boost and dropping back the multiplier several notches: the board refused to POST, even with the lightest drop in voltage, which is a shame. In addition, even though the result above is excellent, we suspect there could be a few watts more saving: we noticed the CPU would not drop below a 20x multiplier with the Core i5-661 installed, despite the fact it should drop down to 9x in its lowest idle state via EIST (SpeedStep).

Conclusion

For those interested in a small form-factor gaming PC, the DFI MI P55-T36 is still the best option. Bear in mind the mini-ITX size though: a decent gaming graphics card is going to easily exceed the 17cm board length, so the final PC will require a bigger than mini-ITX case anyway.

However, the Zotac H55ITX-A-E is well geared for the conventional uses of a mini-ITX motherboard. It offers more features than some ATX boards, offers a bit of overclocking for Core i3/i5 Clarkdale CPUs, yet much lower power use than a larger motherboard. It might not be cheaper than larger micro-ATX boards such as the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, but in terms of value for money, the Zotac is certainly just as good.


Filling the six SATA ports would make a great home server, and the BIOS even includes a headless option. However, there is a distinct lack of low voltage hardware support: we couldn't get our Kingston LoVo memory to its lowest voltage, and we had no joy when trying to undervolt our CPU either. The H55 chipset lacks any form of RAID, but with technologies such as unRAID Linux and Windows Home Server (depending on your time and technical competence) there are still other good choices to make use of. Likewise, if you do want a hardware RAID solution you can put that 16x PCI-E slot to good use.

Despite being packed with features, the Zotac fails to score a perfect 10/10 because the BIOS needs some work. For starters, the board fed our Core i5-750 a stupidly 1.4V by default. We contacted Zotac about this issue and were told that the H55 chipset is not designed for Lynnfield CPUs. However, Zotac's website lists them right alongside Clarkdale Core i3/i5s as being compatible. Strictly speaking, this is true (the PC would boot and run fine), but this board clearly works best with Clarkdale CPUs. We would also have liked to see EIST actually work with our Clarkdate Core i5-661 for even less idle power consumption.

However, combining our favourite Core i3-530 and the Zotac H55ITX-A-E in an elegant mini-ITX case with would make an good value, very low-power tiny PC that would be far more capable than of the Atom-based PCs we've seen lately. Despite its BIOS holdbacks, this is still a great board for tiny PC.

Addendum 19th March: If you want to buy one today, Zotac has just told us that they are currently available from mini-itx.com for £116.

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Score Guide