Gigabyte (as we have told you) is working on remaking their image. They want to be known as a company that builds components for the enthusiast. They are, and have been, working very hard to reach this goal. Their Ultra Durable series of boards have received numerous awards and accolades from review sites and from people who have bought these boards. We have been fortunate enough to review a couple of these and have given you our thoughts on the GA-890FXA-UD7 and are working on a revised impression of the GA-P55A-UD7 as well. For now we are going to move from the big to the small. This is the H55N-UBS3 a Mini-ITX board that features the Intel H55 Express chipset, USB 3.0 and a few Gigabyte special features. Follow along as we dive into this $104.99 board and see if size does not matter.
Section II - Performance Tests, SyntheticIn this section of testing we cover the synthetics. These are tests that run a scripted sequence of internal APIs or that use another installed application to perform a series of scripted events. They are great in that they can provide reproducible results across various platforms. On the down side, synthetic tests can be fooled with driver tweaks and optimizations. In some cases it is necessary to rename the .exe file to something generic to discover if this is the case. In any event when this is needed (when a test shows a drastic difference in performance over the renamed exe) we will note this and show both results for comparison.
PCMark Vantage -PCMark Vantage is a suite of tests designed to test the power of your computer. It runs task that range from productivity to gaming (DX9 only). It is a great test to identify potential problem areas with general performance on a system. It can also show how well a single component can increase or decrease system-wide performance. We run both the x86 and x64 PCMark Suites for testing.
For such a small board the mini-ITX H55N-USB3 does well with PCMark Vantage it is a little behind the leaders and ahead of more than one H57 motherboard.
When overclocked the H55N-USB3 picks up some but falls behind a true Quad core running on the 880G Extreme3.
With the HD5870 in the system the H55N-USB3 pulls out ahead of the pack. This would seem to show us that the overhead from using system memory to fuel the IGP on the Core i5 661 does hinder performance somewhat.
3DMark Vantage -3DMark Vantage is the other FutureMark test that we run on our motherboards. This test simulates the typical tasks that a GPU (and system) would have to perform to provide you with a good gaming experience. It is based on the DX9 and DX10 engines but can only be installed on Windows Vista or later. The suite of tests covers DX9 rendering, DX10 rendering, AI computations and PhysX. The problem with the PhysX calculations is that nVidia owns that technology. This gives them an upper hand in the test runs, for this reason we will always run 3DMark Vantage with GPU PhysX enabled and disabled when we use an nVidia GPU in our testing. As we currently use an HD 5870 this will not be an issue for now.
The IGP on the Core i5 661 when combined with the H55N-USB3 does nicely. It is not the fastest out there but it is only 5 points behind the 2nd place board and 37 points behind the leader.
With the CPU overclocked the H55N-USB3 pulls out in front. This is odd as we find that they CPU score is the lowest one. We checked the BIOS and did not see anything that would indicate that the IGP was any faster than the 900MHz stock clock.
When we dropped in the HD5870 the H55N-USB3 our scores dropped back down it looks like this might be because of a CPU bottle neck. All of the AMD based boards (8xx chipset) were running true quad core CPUs.
HyperPi 0.99b -HyperPi is a front end application that allows you to easily run multiple instances of the SuperPi application. SuperPi, for those that are not familiar with it, is an application that measures the time it takes to calculate the number Pi out to as many as 32 million places. This calculation is then checked and run multiple times (up to 24 for a 32M run). This test stresses the CPU, Memory and HDD as data is handed off between the three. If there is a weak link, HyperPi will show it. For our testing we run the 32M test on as many cores (and threads) as the CPU has available. The slowest CPU time is then recorded.
HyperPi finds the H55N in the middle of the pack at stock speeds, but out in front when overclocked and when we drop the HD5870 into the system. Again with the HD5870 we find that memory performance seems to be improving a little as the time is almost a minute faster.
Cinebench R11.5-Cinenbench R11.5 is the 11th release of Moxon’s rendering test. This test is based off of the Cinema 4D engine, which is one of the industry standard tools for digital animation. It is a powerful product with many different modules that can be “plugged” into it to increase its effectiveness. With Cinebench you get to see how your computer would do using this application. There are two tests; one tests the CPU’s ability to render an image across multiple cores or threads. The other tests your systems ability to handle OpenGL based rendering.
Ouch, the H55N-USB3 is not the best choice if you are looking for a system to use with Cinema 4D. Even when overclocked and with the HD5870 in the system the scores here are not overly impressive.
