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Gigabyte H55N Mini ITX Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Friday, July 30, 2010
Benchmarks - Overclocked
As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match. The effective overclock for these tests is 4.5GHz @ 180MHz. The results are show below.
SiSoft Sandra Various Overclocks
Quake 4
Unreal Tournament 3
Overclocking Conclusion
Overclocking retail processors is always a challenge and largely based on knowing the limitations of your hardware, and how well you can tune your system. The higher multipliers available on our i5-661 did enable us to hit 4.5Ghz without too much trouble however there are a few limitations worth mentioning.
For starters the Thermaltake Silent 1156 is not designed to handle the heat load generated by an overclocked processor. While 4.5Ghz was stable for us the system did get quite hot as a result. We also ran into graphics corruption at anything over 180Ghz BCLK. This could be due to excess heat however we suspect there to be an internal clock issue between the CPU and graphics cores. Testing with a GTX260 allowed us to move past the 180Mhz BLCK limitation without too much trouble.
As with any overclocking adventure your mileage can, and will most likely vary, the important thing is to use the right tools for the job and have fun while doing it.
For starters the Thermaltake Silent 1156 is not designed to handle the heat load generated by an overclocked processor. While 4.5Ghz was stable for us the system did get quite hot as a result. We also ran into graphics corruption at anything over 180Ghz BCLK. This could be due to excess heat however we suspect there to be an internal clock issue between the CPU and graphics cores. Testing with a GTX260 allowed us to move past the 180Mhz BLCK limitation without too much trouble.
As with any overclocking adventure your mileage can, and will most likely vary, the important thing is to use the right tools for the job and have fun while doing it.
