Gaming Results

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. For this particular review we used a low resolution and low graphics detail.

Gaming Performance - Dawn Of War II


Batman Arkham Asylum

For our next benchmark we use Batman’s built-in benchmarking utility. All graphics settings were set to low with a resolution of 1280x800.

Gaming Performance - Batman - Arkham Asylum



Crysis

Crysis is still one of the most graphically demanding games on the market. For this benchmark we use the game’s GPU benchmarking utility. We set the resolution at 1280x800 and left the graphics detail on low.

Gaming Performance - Crysis


In every gaming test ZOTAC’s H55 motherboard slightly out performed its P55 counterpart. nVidia’s aging 8200 graphics platform is simply no match for Intel's newest integrated option.

Test Setup and Power System Benchmarks
Comments Locked

69 Comments

View All Comments

  • wysiwygbill - Saturday, March 6, 2010 - link

    There is apparently a problem with this motherboard that won't allow turbo boost to function. This wouldn't affect the i3 processors where you compared performance with the i3 but you didn't test any i5 processors or compare i7 performance with the DFI.

    I'd be interested to see how much difference the turbo boost would make by comparing i5 performance with the i3 or by comparing the i7 performance with a different motherboard.

    That's assuming you aren't concerned with the DFI bursting into flames should you put an i7 in it. :-)

  • Shadowmaster625 - Friday, March 5, 2010 - link

    $150 for this board is pure insanity. MAYBE if they soldered an i3 to the board it might be worth that much. What is the reasoning behind paying over $300 for a mob/cpu/RAM combo for something like an HTPC? How does this possibly justify a 50% premium versus a similar AMD HTPC setup?
  • ROID R4GE - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link

    What I am most interested in (and haven't seen anyone mention) is finding out if this motherboard along with and i3 530 can handle playback of a 1080p .mkv file.

    have you done any testing of this type?
  • ROID R4GE - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link

    ok, if anyone is interested. the core i3 and this motherboard can handle a .mkv 1080p movie
  • justniz - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link

    The tests would have been A LOT more informative if you had included figures from the same tests on a full-sized motherboard with the same ram, cpu and graphics card, so we could see exactly how much of a penalty (if any) the just switching to the smaller size board brings.
  • ScavengerLX - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link

    From my experience power consumption between an mATX and its mini-ITX counterpart is generally around a ~5 watts higher. Not a huge difference. I think it would be interesting to see how an ATX system compares to a comparable mini-ITX system though.

    Josh
  • willtriv - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link

    DFI had a x55 series ITX board on the market for a few months.
    Unless we are talking about h55 and it was a p55...
  • ggathagan - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link

    Yes, this is an H55 chipset, allowing for the use of the i3/i5 on-die GPU, whereas DFI's board is P55, requiring an additional GPU card.
  • karlkesselman - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link

    it seems to me that actually for IDLE power consumption the DFI motherboard is better than Zotac, is it not?
    We have:
    Zotac H55 i3 530 (not igp) = 53 W
    DFI MI-P55 i3 530 (not igp) = 43 W

    So the DFI is 10 W lower on IDLE than Zotac. Can you confirm this? (I assume they use same video card in this case)
  • Ben - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link

    Something in a banner ad in this article just tried to install a fake Antivirus on my computer!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now