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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just4U - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Ever since I read about there being problems on the 1156 boards with certain sockets... I've been leary about buying any 1156 boards. I'd heard reports that it was happening even to those not overclocking and for me that's cause for concern. I look at all the offerings and wonder..Is it fixed? Which boards would be effected? I'd like more info on that before I even consider purchasing the i5/i3 etc. Perhaps Anand can include information on all this in part2 or 3?
Thanks.
Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Hi,There have been no official updates from socket vendors/intel/board vendors as to the exact cause of socket burnouts we experienced on some fo the early 1156 boards. To date, it appears the majority of issues reported have been on boards that were manufactured pre September 2009.
FWIW, all of the sample boards I've had for H55/H57 have arrived with Lotes sockets so far, although I'm not sure if that means vendors are not using Foxconn altogether. We have not seen any issues in testing thus far.
regards
Raja
just4U - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Yeah that's another thing that keeps me put off. Is I don't know which boards are using the Foxconn. Anyway thanks for the reply back.thaze - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
I just received a Gigabyte GA-H57M-USB3 and an Intel Core i3-530.An interesting feature seemed to be the Dolby Home Theater (i.e. Dolby Digital live encoding). However its software is hard to find, there's no reference in the Gigabyte CD's main menu. I eventually found it at \utility\dolby\. Install went fine but the program is crashing when executed. Maybe someone could confirm the same problem running Win 7 x64.
thaze - Friday, February 5, 2010 - link
"I've forwarded your problem to our HQ, and your problem is duplicated.A solution will be provided by HQ very soon.
Please just wait for my further information later."
Rajinder Gill - Friday, February 5, 2010 - link
Hi Thaze,Gigabyte messed up on this one, their engineers forgot to add the BIOS string to unlock the Dolby features on the H55/H57M-USB3 models. BIOS F3a beta (Jan 8 dated I think) was pulled a couple of days ago from their support page and is due to be replaced with an F4 BIOS fixing the problem.
regards
Raja
thaze - Saturday, February 6, 2010 - link
Thanks again for the details. F4 is out now and I can finally use Dolby Home Theater. :)Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Hi,Just testing the GB boards now, so will get back to you with an answer on this asap. I'm on Win 7 64 bit.
regards
Raja
Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Hi,It appears you are correct. I just installed the Dolby X64 package and when I try to run the software, it crashes.
regards
Raja
thaze - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Thank you for your reply.I also sent a message to GB support yesterday, will inform about their statement here.