Choosing the Best H55/H57 Motherboard - Part 1
by Rajinder Gill on January 31, 2010 11:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to Ultra, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
Far Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. For single GPU results we set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with 2xAA.
A surprising result, it seems the Clarkdale architecture is suited to Far Cry 2. Stock results surpass the i7-920 at 4GHz in this benchmark. We're not quite sure why this is the case, but the results are repeatable in this bench.
Resident Evil 5
For our final game benchmark we decided to add the Resident Evil 5's fixed time demo, running DX10, Ultra settings and 4xAA.
We're on a level playing field in this benchmark; there's a bit of scaling between 3~4GHz after which the Resident Evil engine is GPU bound.
In all three of these benchmarks, it's apparent that speeds higher than 4GHz on Clarkdale don't offer much in the way of frame rate scaling with an NVIDIA GTX 275 GPU. A more powerful GPU or an overclock of the graphics card would be required to see any gains from pushing the platform further.
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crochat - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
In my opinion testing H5X boards should focus on IGP. Isn't that the aim of the chipset to use CPUs with IGP? Instead of the gaming benchmarks I'd be much more interested in multimedia and peripheral (firewire, esata, usb, networking) performance.Regards
thorgal73 - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link
Just to let you know, Massman found the solution to the IGP overclocking problem :http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&ar...">http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&ar...
Cheers!
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link
Thanks for the link.That actually makes a lot of sense and explains the extra IGP voltage you have to pump - even though BIOS shows a fixed IGP freqeuncy.
Probably a good idea just to make it into an Excel calc so people can use it easily.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/2go0yotyz5z/quick">http://www.mediafire.com/file/2go0yotyz5z/quick igp calc.xlsx
later
Raja
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link
This one's a bit better, easy to work out the required BCLK for and equivalent IGP frequency at various IGP multiplier ratios.http://www.mediafire.com/file/nhfnnedgzwb/quick">http://www.mediafire.com/file/nhfnnedgzwb/quick igp calc.xlsx
yuhong - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
"If you're going to use the IGP, you don't really need the extra PCI-E lanes, which essentially means that you're paying for the option to run RAID on the H57 PCH. "Well, USB 3.0 and SATA 6GBps takes 4 PCIe lanes.
Rajinder Gill - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
You're looking at $200 boards that offer both SATA 6G and USB 3.0 in tandem unfortunately. USB 3.0 can be had under $130, with enough PCI/e left over for upgrading IMO.Nataku - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Just wondering (may be I'm just being dumb)Do you know if any or all of the h55 boards support dual screen?
I've been wanting to build a HTPC and dual screen it with my TV and a touch screen, but wasn't sure if the video out can actually work in dual screen mode.(ran into one that only ran in clone long ago =.=)
Also, this is off topic but, will you guys be making some reviews on touch screen monitors? HP and Dell are selling 20"+ touchscreens at around 300CAD but Firebox and Elo are selling 15" at 4~500CAD. Just curious how that part of the industry are coming along (20" too big imo to be beside a TV...)
Rajinder Gill - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Hi,Yes, dual display options are offered as part of Intel's drivers for the IGP. So you should be able to setup both options. I've tried with DVI and HDMI outputs simultaneously and it recognises both fine and allows you to set them up.
Jarred's the guy for monitors and such, so I'll pass the info over to him.
Hope this helps..
Raja
Nataku - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link
Thanks :)Rick83 - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
I am currently looking to upgrade my server and the savings from replacing the old nv 6200 with on-chip graphics are attractive.Now, normally this would be a done decision, but I am planning on running quite a few drives in that box, 14 to be precise. Currently I have one RAID 5, one RAID 1, one root disk and one optical drive, I will add another RAID 5 and another RAID 1 as part of the upgrade. All except 5 drives are attached via SATA. I already have an IDE-controller installed via PCI, but I'd like to avoid installing an extra SATA controller, as it seems much cheaper to just go for a board with 10x SATA on board.
But due to my use of full-disk encryption, I'd really like to be able to access AES-NI, so it will have to be a clarksdale i5. There are P55 boards with 10 SATA ports, and X58 boards too, but I'd really like to go with the on-chip graphics, both to save what little pci-e I have on these boards, as well as to save the space and energy.
Does anyone reasonably expect Asus or Gigabyte or MSI (as those are the usual suspects for 10x SATA) to release such a board based on H5x? If not, I'd best grab an old Gigabyte P55 UD5 soon...