Performance Comparison

As usual, we are going to compare the mainboards in two different modes: at their default settings and during overclocking. The first mode is interesting because most users do not fine-tune their systems, but leave the BIOS settings at their defaults. The new results will be compared with those we obtained in our earlier tests of mini-ITX LGA1156 mainboards based on the Intel H55/H57 Express chipsets: Intel DH57JG and Zotac H55-ITX WiFi.

The mainboards are listed on the diagrams according to their performance (from high to low). The results of the Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3 are marked with a darker color for your convenience.

Cinebench version 11.5 has been released recently. We run its CPU tests five times and calculate the average.

We have been using Fritz Chess Benchmark utility for a long time already. It is a good benchmark that produces repeatable results. It also shows excellent scalability depending on the number of execution threads.

A small video is encoded in two passes in x264 HD Benchmark 3.0. This process is then repeated four times. The following diagram shows the averaged results of the second pass.

In the archiving test a 1GB file is compressed using LZMA2 at default compression settings.

Like in the data compression test, the faster 16 million digits of Pi are calculated, the better. This is the only benchmark where the number of processor cores doesn’t really matter. The test runs as a single thread.

Complex performance tests have both highs and lows but 3DMark Vantage has become extremely popular despite its downsides. The diagram below shows the results of a triple run of the cycle of tests.

Since we do not overclock the graphics subsystem in our mainboard reviews, the next diagram shows the results of the CPU test from the 3D Mark Vantage suite.

We use FC2 Benchmark Tool to go over the Ranch Small map ten times at a resolution of 1280x1024 with medium and high image quality settings in DirectX 10 mode.

Resident Evil 5 has a built-in performance test, too. Its peculiarity is that it can take advantage of multi-core processor architecture. The game runs in DirectX 10 mode at 1280x1024 with medium quality settings. The diagram shows the average of five runs.

Mainboards do not usually differ much in terms of performance when working with the same settings. We can only see the Intel DH57JG enjoying a small advantage across all of the tests due to its memory subsystem optimizations (you can refer to our review of that mainboard for details). The Gigabyte GA-H55N-USB3 is just as fast as the others.

We also ran the same tests with the overclocked CPU and memory and the Gigabyte mainboard proved to be an unrivalled winner.