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 IV Performance – GamingGaming as a test of motherboard performance is sort of a joke these days. The big player in the gaming arena is the GPU. Everyone but a few hardcore PR teams know this. However, it is important to run at least a few (one from each current DX version) to see if there are any issues with the combination of components on a motherboard. These are items like Audio lag, memory lag and of course problems with the PCIe lanes and signal traces. If there are issues in design, drivers or BIOS then you can have odd gaming performance. So without much more preamble let’s dive into the three games we currently use; SIMS 3 for DX9 and FarCry 2 for DX10 These two games represent a good mix of low end and high end games for IGP testing.
SIMS 3 DX9 -SIMS 3 is (obviously) the third in the popular SIMS game franchise. In it you play a simulated person of your creation. You have to take your SIM through the same actions you would in “normal” life including eating, bathing, and other daily activities. Surprisingly the graphics can be fairly rough on a GPU. But as the SIMS is a mainstream game is seemed perfect for our IGP testing. Settings (for both IGP and HD5870) are shown below as are the performance numbers.
The SIMS3 performance was not that impressive (it was not impressive at all to be honest) we saw frame rates of around 12 at both stock and overclocked speeds. With the HD5870 things picked up, but that is to be expected after all.
FarCry2 DX10 -Although not one of my favorite games this tedious game does have some good graphics. The large sandbox style of the game lends to mission based play. The only problem is that the AI is rather low grade. Still the more CPU power the more the bad guys try to do. Over all the game was a little bit of a disappointment to play, but still not a bad DX10 representation. Our testing run starts right after you get your first mission to clean out the safe-house and ends after the hostage rescue. Settings (for both IGP and HD5870) and performance numbers are shown below.
FarCry 2 with the demands of DX10 was even worse than the performance we saw with SIMS 3. The average frame rates were in the single digits. Of course, as you would expect when you drop in the HD5870 things turn around.
Gaming wrap-up;Not much to say really. We already know that most IGPs (internal graphics processors) are not good for high-end gaming. We have found that you can very often play games that are a couple of generations old (like Half Life) at very good resolutions. You are also able to run the majority of entry level and mainstream games at acceptable resolutions. The H55N-USB3 when relying on the HD GMA did not perform so well in our tests. Granted both of the games we use can be rough on a GPU. When we dropped in a better GPU the H55N-USB3 responded very nicely and gave us more than acceptable performance.
