H67 – A Triumvirate of Tantalizing Technology
by Ian Cutress on March 27, 2011 6:25 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Sandy Bridge
- H67
BIOS
Out of the Sandy Bridge chipset UEFI/BIOSes I have seen so far, the ECS implementation, whilst functional, is not breaking any new ground. In actual fact, it can be a bit of a pig to use. It is not always obvious where options are for a start.
There is no main screen to see what you have got installed, what voltages are being applied, what temperature it is running at, what DIMMs you have installed, etc. The best is this screen shown above, which gives the processor, some voltages and total memory. There is another screen with similar information and the ‘system temperature’, which could either be the CPU, or the Chipset, or an average of the two.
The smart fan options give you Normal/Quiet/Silent/Manual, and all the options above (except CPU Fan Full Speed Offset) can be changed. There is no high performance option if you want/need the fan on full all the time however.
A lot of the BIOS options are embedded in the Advanced Menu, and in one of the subsequent sub-menus within. A lot of these sub-menus have a single option or two, meaning that there is constant flicking between them if you want to check every system setting. Not exactly the best way of organizing a BIOS in my opinion – and seasoned BIOS users are used to pressing F10 on almost all motherboards as the button for ‘Save and Exit’. ECS have confusingly set this to F4.
One positive option I like in the BIOS, which is not available in various UEFIs such as the ASRock, is the ability to perform a one-off boot selection from a different device, such as a bootable USB, without having to change the order of the boot devices both before and after what you have done.
Also, as I mentioned previously, there is an oddity with the RAM timings on the board. If your kit is 1333 MHz C9, then the board will run them at 1333 MHz C9. If your memory is faster than this, it will default to 1333 MHz 8-8-8-24. Also, these timings are unchangeable in the BIOS itself. While H67 boards will not go above 1333 MHz, usually the sub-timings are interchangeable at least.
Overclocking
Overclocking on the ECS board was difficult, confusing, and initially fruitless. The i5-2500K we used has an 850 MHz Intel HD 3000 Graphics core, with a Turbo Boost up to 1100 MHz. However, in the ECS BIOS options, there is very little to change.
If you can find the OC options by going through the MIB III -> Performance Tuning -> Chipset Configuration menus, there are three different options: Current, Ratio, and Voltage. The Ratio option is obviously the critical one here, but surprisingly it gives options between 17x and 60x but doesn’t tell you what value that multiplier is multiplied by – naturally, we assumed 100 MHz given the bus speed, but this isn’t the case here. After much testing thinking it was 100 MHz, ECS indirectly have told us that this is multiplied by 50 MHz to give the integrated graphics speed, which is inline with what we saw on the ASRock board.
Putting the multiplier at 28x gave 1400 MHz on the integrated GPU, which ran Metro2033 fine. All the way up to 34x (1700 MHz) also worked without increasing the voltage, and gave 22.32 FPS for Metro2033. At 36x (1800 MHz), the OS loaded fine, but then became unstable – upping the Graphics Voltage to 0.1V made this stable, but gave no difference in FPS from 1700 MHz. At 38x (1900 MHz), again the OS was fine, but still no FPS difference (22.37 FPS) at the same voltage. To double check nothing was wrong, I upped the Graphics Current from Normal to Max, at which point Metro2033 crashed on its first run. At 40x, 42x and 44x, the same thing happens – no FPS increase.
This behaviour is similar to the ASRock board, except rather than hitting a maximum and decreasing, the ECS board levels out:
For a ‘Black Series’ moniker on a board, the GPU overclock does well. Overclock results were:
- Metro2033: 22.33 FPS, up 26.2% from 17.7 FPS
- Dirt2: 32.2 FPS, up 18.95% from 27.07 FPS
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MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 - link
Well done, Gigabyte! And it's a shame how poorly the others are doing in comparison. I fI wanted high power consumption I could just stick with an old machine or get an AMD..Not wanting to start a bashing / flame war. It's just that in my eyes the exceptional power consumption (especially idle) of the Sandy Bridge + IGP (plus excellent performance) is what makes it really attractive for really many roles.
MrS
trogthefirst - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
Actually i was torn between H67/61 and one of those 785G/880G platforms for my aunt recently - non gaming build In the end she needed multi display scalable to possibly 3-4 displays so i went with a cheapo 880G and an $70ish AthlonII X3 With the Surround View feature you could run, with a Radeon GPU up to 4 displays (2 from integrated graphics) and 2 off something like a passively cooled HD 4350/5450 Sounds like a lot of expansion, features, etc for such a cheap platform if u ask me!loimlo - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
Dear IanWould you like to share us with Power cumsumption measurement detail?
1. Is it DC or AC draws?
2. How do you measure the watts? From the wall plug by using Kill-a-watt?
3. Did you give not so useful MB's energy-efficiency software like ASRock IES, Gigabyte Energy Saver?
That said, I never had good experience with these softwares, especially Gigabyte one.
ShadowVlican - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
did you guys measure total system power consumption, or is that just motherboard? looking to build a HTPC, would love something modern and doesn't eat powertpk911 - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
Intel to release Z68 chipsets in first half of MayMonica Chen, Taipei; Steve Shen, DIGITIMES [Wednesday 20 April 2011]
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110419PD212.html
Intel will release its Z68 chipsets in the first half of May, with Gigabyte Technology likely to be the first major motherboard maker to launch Z68-based products as soon as its embargo expires. Gigabyte's offerings will include its top-end GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 model.
Motherboard makers have also reportedly been informed that Intel will focus more on its Z- and H-series chipsets.
The share of P67-series motherboards will begin dropping once the Z68 is launched and the segment will gradually be phased out, with the P-series not being included in Intel's next generation chipsets.
...just a quick update, if I may :)
gsuburban - Sunday, February 12, 2012 - link
I wanted to upgrade from an Asus P5 series board and found most of the P8 boards had no floppy or ide (pata) interface on them. Since I still have 2 great BenQ 1655 DVD recorders, they wouldn't be usable without buying a PCI PATA card. After looking matters over I didn't see much benefit in using up 2 of 6 SATA ports since I have at least 4 hard drives and would be limited on SATA ports etc.I thought it over and discovered the P8H67-V and P8H67-M Pro by Asus still had the ide interface on board. No floppy but at least the IDE was there which would yield 6 SATA ports available without using them for the DVD-Optical.
I use XP Pro still since it does have it's advantages in some areas and not having the floppy drive is the pits as you can't load AHCI drivers via the F6 prompt in setup. I tried all sorts of ideas such as a custom image that included the AHCI drivers etc without success.
The P67 boards are totally fine and they run fast with the right CPU and memory but they are best used with Windows 7. The H67 boards save you about $250 since you don't need a video card, the boards are less than the P67's and with the select models, you get an IDE port which also frees up 2 SATA ports for those who still have IDE devices.
H67 would be my choice for high performance every day computing since the graphics are much improved from the days of G series and price is low, around $105.
I think it's too soon to eliminate the floppy and IDE interface at any rate.