H67 – A Triumvirate of Tantalizing Technology
by Ian Cutress on March 27, 2011 6:25 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Sandy Bridge
- H67
UEFI
The ASRock UEFI we have with the H67M-GE/HT is almost identical to the P67 UEFI – a series of BIOS options on a graphical interface with use of a mouse. Alongside the booting speed benefits of the UEFI, it is pleasing to see that the graphical interface is going to become the future. The ASRock UEFI is an 8MB file, double the size of the ASUS and Gigabyte equivalents (excluding GB’s dual boot BIOS system), so there is plenty of room to grow.
As before, you will find that in the UEFI, the mouse wheel does not work. This is not a massive deal-breaker, by any means. I still prefer using the keyboard to navigate all the options, and I had no issues in using the arrow keys. You cannot use the number pad to put in voltages and such, which would be a nice touch.
The main difference between the P67 and the H67 versions of the ASRock UEFI is the overclock options which allow the GPU overclocking. The GPU EZ Settings give options between 1400 and 1600 MHz options with my 2500K, all of which work off the bat (see the overclock section below). The memory OC options are also fairly similar to the P67, except here you will only get a choice of Auto, DDR3-1000 or DDR3-1333 MHz options. All the timings are adjustable too.
Overclocking
Overclocking for the H67 series of motherboards is limited to the integrated GPU only. On our 2500K ES processor, we have Intel’s latest HD3000 integrated graphics solution, containing 12 EUs (similar to NVIDIA CUDA cores or AMD SPs) which run at 850 MHz standard and 1100 MHz turbo.
The UEFI or BIOS implementation essentially determines how you overclock the integrated graphics solution. In this instance, while the ASRock AXTU software allows changing the graphics speed, a restart is required each time it is used. Inside the UEFI itself, you have two overclocking options.
Firstly, is the predefined easy overclock option. On ASRock boards of late, I have been enjoying this option, as more often than not, just one click and it works. The ASRock H67M-GE/HT gave three options with my 2500K – 1400, 1500 and 1600 MHz. Each of these modes worked flawlessly first time, no problems. On Metro 2033 1024x768 on Normal graphics, an increase from 17.67 fps at default to 21.50 fps was seen at 1600 MHz.
The other option to overclock via the UEFI is manually increasing the speed in 50 MHz jumps, up to a 3000 MHz option. Also combined with this is an IGP voltage offset setting, allowing +0.05 V to +0.25 V in 0.05 V jumps. Below are the results from slowly increasing the MHz and increasing the voltage as required when the benchmark became unstable:
What was interesting to me was that I was able to boot easily, and the only failures came during heavy GPU usage. At 1900 MHz, the fps decreased, to which I was initially confused about. I upped the voltage further (to +0.25V) but to no avail, still got 21.90 fps. Even upping the power limits to 150 W, and the core current limit to 200 A, no change is observed. This leads me to the conclusion that at a certain point, the GPU will clock back to a safe(r) value (even if GPU MHz monitoring tools keep reporting the UEFI selected value), no matter what voltage setting is chosen, and there may be a peak in terms of performance which is fine tunable. This will be confirmed by testing other boards.
The best OC gave:
- Metro2033: 22.5 FPS, up 27.3% from 17.67 FPS
- Dirt2: 29.6 FPS, up 10.0% from 26.93 FPS
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bupkus - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Agreed. The i3-2100 is a true budget cpu, imho. It should be matched with a true budget mobo-- namely the H61. I hope to see some more info on boards made with that chipset.Taft12 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
It's not accurate to call the i3-2100 a "true budget CPU" while we've got stuff like the Athlon II X2 and Pentium E5xxx on the market.cjs150 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
I am pleased you said this, because this is something I do not understand either, H67 looks to be a waste of timeASrock seems the best of this silly catagory. I have one of their boards in a file server, nice board, just works without fuss. Perfect for a server. May look at them for next build, instead of my usual ASUS fetish.
One thing though that really bugs me. Why on all the Micro-ATX boards out there do they insist on having the top PCI-E so close to the bottom end of the memory sockets. Have the MB manufacturers not noticed that high end memory is shipping with cooling fans? Several times I have found it impossible to fit a graphics card and the memory fan, virtually every time at the very least I have to ensure that there are no possible shorts by putting electricians tape around the bottom of the memory fan clup on. MB manufacturers it is not difficult, move the PCI-E slot down by 5mm or the memory sokets up by 5mm
bigboxes - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Not a bash, but fans on DDR3 ram is mostly frivolous waste. Heck, most ram today doesn't even need fancy heatspreaders because they run so cool. This is about the H67 chipset so I don't think many would waste time/money on buying high end memory that offers little in the terms of performance. Don't worry, Z68 is coming soon and you'll be able to buy your full ATX board that you can load up with the latest and greatest in parts to get that XTREME o/c. This chipset is not marketed for you.ArtShapiro - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
I'd like to think that I (a decided non-gamer) am the target audience.I currently have a physically large (huge?) desktop system in a Chenboro 105 case. No way this monster can fit in the alcove in my computer desk, so it sits on the floor with the usual scads of cables coming from the desk. What a royal pain to move, clean, etc.
I suspect this summer I'll have an H67 system in a tiny (maybe Antec 300-150) case, little bigger than my tiny Asus TS mini Windows Home Server machine. With no graphic card, this thing should be efficient and dwarf the performance of the existing monster.
The H67 setup fits my needs to an alarming degree!
Art
Concillian - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
What about this system cannot be handled by a significantly cheaper H61 motherboard? I missed that part of why H67 was perfect.
Taft12 - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
He's not a gamer, but maybe he wants the SATA 6Gbit ports? 4 memory slots? USB 3.0?H61 boards are lacking, well, a lot if you're want anything beyond ultra-entry-level.
ArtShapiro - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Pure power. The cost is irrelevant (within reason); the increased processor of, say, the 2500/2500K will be a nice thing in processor-heavy applications and will probably ensure a longer relevant lifetime for the machine.I figure it's worth it to shell out a little more upfront for the H67.
Art
bobbyto34 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Thanks a lot for testing DPC Latency. This can be a major issue for DAW's users.Spoelie - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
I would concede that an integrated GPU is a very valuable tool for any computer user. It can be used to eliminate variables when troubleshooting a system, and to prevent downtime when the discrete GPU passes away. For this reason and this reason alone I personally don't buy a system without an integrated GPU anymore, even though I always have discrete GPUs. At least in 2 cases this has helped me tremendously.My personal preference is a cheap but good overclocking mATX board with (support for) iGPU & at least 1 eSATA port. Couldn't care less about SLI/XFire & RAID5, so the 785+SB710 board I now use was perfect, but without USB3 and SATA6 it's starting to show its age. One of the reasons I haven't switched to SNB is that Intel can't provide me that platform yet.
Here's to hoping for cheap mATX Z68 and cheap(er) K series CPUs.