The fact that EVGA H55 mainboard is the slowest of all in this test round is surprising neither for us, nor for our regular readers. Remember our EVGA P55 FTW review? That mainboard also fell slightly behind all its competitors working in identical conditions. Looks like this state of things is typical of EVGA mainboards, but the performance difference is actually so minor that you can only notice it during the tests. It is sad mostly in psychological rather than practical terms and won’t cause you any issues during everyday work. Besides, EVGA P55 FTW performed pretty well during overclocking, which unfortunately, is not the case today. We were even concerned whether we should reveal the results of our performance comparison during overclocking at all, because the performance of a CPU working at 3.9 GHz is obviously lower than that of a CPU working at 4.5 GHz on other mainboards. At last we made up our mind and ran the tests. Of course, the performance difference is no longer minor, but to our regret that’s all EVGA H55 is capable of during overclocking.

To be fair I have to say that in fact EVGA H55 is only formally the last during overclocking. In fact, this shameful spot belongs to Intel DH55TC, which can’t do even that much. The best it allows you is a 10-15 MHz base clock increase above the nominal that is why we didn’t even run the performance tests in this “overclocked mode at all. Besides, you can improve the EVGA H55 mainboard performance in nominal mode. OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Blade Series Low Voltage OCZ3B1600LV6GK memory we use is recognized by the system as DDR3 1067 MHz only for compatibility reasons. Once you increase its voltage, the memory can work at 1600 MHz frequency with low timings. EVGA mainboard allows lowering the timings, raising the frequency and voltage, while Intel DH55TC has no options like that. So, EVGA mainboard does yield noticeably to its competitors, but at the same time it is also remarkably superior to the Intel product.