We start with the same old "swings and roundabouts" in performance figures that you’ll never notice in real world usage:

Gaming Performance - Dawn Of War II - i5 661 CPU @ Stock

Application Performance - Sorenson Squeeze 6 - i5 661 CPU

 

Power Consumption

Our power consumption testing utilizes the same batch of components under similar circumstances in a bid to monitor variances between idle and CPU load conditions. We install the vendor supplied power saving utilities on each board and enable power saving modes that don't involve any kind of underclocking or CPU core frequency modulation in order to run an apples to apples comparison.

ATX PSU switching losses are absent from our figures because we monitor power consumption directly at the DC rails of the PSU. These figures measure only the CPU, motherboard and memory DC power draw and exclude any other peripherals, such as cooling fans and hard drives etc. Actual AC power consumption for the motherboard will be anywhere from 15~40% higher than these figures depending upon the efficiency of your power supply.

Motherboard Power Consumption - Idle Power - i5 661 CPU - IGP

Motherboard Power Consumption - HD Video Playback - i5 661 CPU

The H55N-USB3's idle power consumption is excellent, although you lose out on efficiency under load compared to boards from Intel and ECS.

 

Overclocking

Using the stock Intel cooler with our 661 sample, we managed achieve around 4.2GHz Linpack stable:

The Clarkdale IMC isn’t ideally suited to high memory bandwidth, so we settled for a perfectly respectable DDR3-1640 with CAS 6-7-6-18 timings using our high-end Corsair Dominator kit whilst keeping QPI and CPU frequency in sync.  This overclock was held stable by using 1.31Vcore (load voltage is likely a lot less as we kept Vdroop enabled), a set VTT of 1.31V and VDIMM of 1.65V.

Pushing higher than this would be possible with improved processor cooling, but as a side-effect requires more VTT if QPI and memory frequency is not relaxed - and we’re already setting 1.31V which seems to be the upper limit of what the VTT VRM can handle. Setting a higher voltage results in the board shutting down during Linpack, which confirms OCP does work on this particular rail.

We also checked out possibilities with a Lynnfield, using our 875-K sample to see what the board can handle:

3.66GHz is the upper level of what is achievable during Linpack with a HT enabled i7 processor. It’s not the greatest overclock, but is better than what some of the other H55 mini-TX boards can manage and is competitive with DFI’s MI-T36, aside from it being easier to cool the processor on the latter due to a better layout. Out of interest, we did attempt multiplier only overclocking too, but found that same overall CPU clock speed limit – any higher and the board shuts down during Linpack.

Should you opt for an i5-750 Lynnfield, CPU speeds up to 3.8GHz should be sustainable, provided you can find a way to keep the CPU cool enough under heavy loads.

Gigabyte H55N-USB3 : Mini-ITX done the Gigabyte way... Board Features, Software and BIOS
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  • Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link

    Hi,

    Have you tried doing things without XMP? The trouble with XMP profiles is that they assume a certain voltage will work with all processors, unfortunately, this is not the case. I would set the timings and voltage up manually if you can, which should help.

    Failing that, pop me a mail at (remove the brackets) rajinder.gill(@)anandtech.com with your BIOS settings and I'll help out where I can.

    Regards
    Raja
  • staryoshi - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link

    Yeah, I've tried it without as well. Turns out it won't let me alter voltage or timings for the memory. I've sent an email to Gigabyte to see if that'll get me anywhere... I'll keep playing with it today and I'll send you an e-mail if I have any questions. I'll e-mail you a picture of the back of the board to show you what I did, too. It's not pretty, but no one can see it :)
  • Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link

    No worries, I've got a good idea of what you did to mount it. It's fine if you only ever intend to use it with socket 1156. Pop me a mail on the memory stuff if need be.

    Regards
    Raja
  • fr500 - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link

    Just as a heads up, the Corsair H50 works fine with a pair of washers on each hole.

    The Thermalright AXP-140 works too but I dunno if it will be enough for a 1156 lynnfield. It would be great if there could be an 1156 ITX roundup here testing:

    - ECS H55I
    - H55N-USB3
    - Zotac H55-A-E
    - DH57JG
    - DFI MI P55-T36

    More than performance which should be pretty close on any of these boards, a test of compatibility with some heatsinks (using discrete GPUs and not) and overclocking limits :p
  • pectin232 - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

    Can you help with BIOS settings for this board. I truly appreciate. I have the same board with the i7 860 instead of the 865. I got 8GB DDR3 1333 memory from G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL. Any help is truly appreciate. For memory I probably might just put all as auto instead of messing with those TRas settings.

    Phillip
  • pectin232 - Thursday, November 18, 2010 - link

    and ATI 5770. Memory is 1666ghz ddr3. Anyone knows of what can be done to bump higher... I have water cooled/ I only spend 10 mins to raise the SPD only nothing else... and got 3.2ghz or 3.18 or so... to be more accurate.It is good enough but I though if I can raise higher why not...
  • rrplay - Saturday, January 1, 2011 - link

    Thanks for the nice review i should be getting this soon for an upcoming build.Don't ya can go wrong with this one for a mini-atx build.

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