Asus P7H55-M review

Can you get the most from Clarkdale with such a reasonably priced motherboard?

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Asus P7H55-M
It's a bargain MoBo, but does it deliver the performance?

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We tested the P7H55-M with an Intel i7-870, a meaty Radeon graphics card and two sticks of Corsair memory running at 1,333MHz (although it isn't, true memory speed is arcane knowledge).

Here we've pitched the new bug against a Gigabtye H55M-UD2H – not quite as feature-rich perhaps, but using the same Intel chipset and aimed at the same buyer and sells for about the same, too. Both boards were run without any overclocking (not as easy as it sounds; they were quite keen).

As you might expect, it's a close-run thing. The Asus has a slim but clear lead in the application benchmarks. Why the memory bandwidths differ is a bit of a mystery. An erroneous timing setting perhaps?

CPU rendering

Cinebench R10 – time in seconds, lower is better
Asus P7H55-M: 47
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 52

Cinebench R11 – index, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 5.52
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 5.13

Video encoding

X264 V.2 – frames per second, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 28.57
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 27.84

Game physics

World in Conflict – frames per second, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 239
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 238

Memory speed

SiSoft Sandra – data transfer rate, higher is better
Asus P7H55-M: 16.1GB/s
Gigabtye H55M-UD2H: 16.7GB/s

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