Zotac H55-ITX Review - The World's First mini-ITX H55 Motherboard
by Joshua Youngberg on February 28, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Performance summary
App and Gaming Performance
We found that the H55-ITX performs comparably to the other H55/P55 motherboards on the market during system benchmarking.
Power Consumption
For our system power consumption tests we measure the watts being pulled out from the wall socket by the entire system. Keep in mind that power consumption at the wall can vary for a specific system based on the efficiency of the power supply being used. For these tests every power saving option in the BIOSes were turned on.
The Zotac H55-ITX put down some of the lowest idle power consumption numbers that I have ever recorded on a desktop. System consumption under 100% CPU load was very mild as well. Numbers this low would make the H55-ITX ideal for a system that is rarely shutdown, like a HTPC.
Audio Latency
During our battery of tests we also measure DPC latency. This will be of particular interest to the audiophiles of the world.
Overclocking
While testing the H55-ITX we decided to take a different turn for the overclocking segment. Instead of pushing the board to its limits in order to find its maximum frequencies we chose to find the perfect balance between speed and voltage. The fact that the VRM for CPU Vcore is very restricted and that the BIOS offered no adjustment for CPU VTT voltage helped point us in this direction.
To reach our final overclock on our i3 530 I simply raised the Bclock to 150, lowered the Vcore to the default, 1.20V, minus .025V and adjusted the Vdimm to 1.65V. 1.175V was the lowest Vcore we could use to maintain a 150 Bclock. All other available voltages were untouched. For system memory the timings were manually set to 9-9-9-24-72 and the frequency was set at 1500MHz. On a side note, I ran this system in a Silverstone SG06 and using the factory Intel heatsink core temperatures rarely got above 50 degrees Celsius.
We chose not to overclock the i7 860 to avoid any risk to the ZOTAC motherboards power circuitry. The H55-ITX simply wasn't designed to power a heavily overclocked quad core.
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damianrobertjones - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
InstallWindows 7 Pro, latest flash installed, IE 8
Etern205 - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
I've been on this site for years and have not encounter what you're getting.Voo - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
Never happened to me, you're sure it's not something nasty on your PC? Wouldn't be the first of its kind..JarredWalton - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
It does sound more like an infection rather than one of our ads, though I could be wrong. If you can provide specific details on the advertisement, that would be helpful. (Not that I have nothing to do with ads, but I could at least pass the information along to the appropriate person.)Assuming it's an infection (very possibly a rootkit), here are a few suggestions:
1) http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php">Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
2) http://download.cnet.com/Ad-Aware-Free-Anti-Malwar...">Ad-Aware Free
3) http://download.cnet.com/Spybot-Search-amp-Destroy...">Spybot Search & Destroy
If you run those and get an infection, and still have issues after cleaning, you might need to try http://www.gmer.net/">GMER.exe... there's a particularly nasty rootkit going around right now that infects your ATAPI.SYS file, and GMER.EXE will fix that one. I don't recommend this as a first option, though, as it's not user friendly and can be a powerful (re: dangerous) tool in the hands of an inexperienced user.
/Tangent.
damianrobertjones - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
It's always the user hey...Tomshardware has recently been diverting my laptop to a malware page so... I asked a forum to check and it happened to them. I then created a clean vm, updated, installed AV, bam, same thing.
New machine out of a box, the only machine on the connection, updated, AV, bam... re-direction.
Please resolve your banner situation and I've already sent a mail to Toms with no response. It's not always the users
The0ne - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Toms is not a good site to go to nowadays, especially if you don't have the capability to turn scripts off! If you do use some sort of script blocking plugin, take a look at all the fcking junk that Toms has on their site. Truly amazing and disgusting. Mind you I'm not saying they're bad, just a lot of junk the visitor aren't aware of.banthespam - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
I believe FaaR is correct. I was browsing over pc.ign.com and got the exact same page (obvious ad-redirect to malware). So I googled the malware url and found this page. First time I brought it up, it redirected me to the malware site. But it's a one time thing. I tried to reload, clear cache cookies and so on, could never get the malware site again. They're hidding it well. There's probably even some random stuff thrown in so you never know when it'll brought up.And yes, just in case, I did scan my comp, absolutly nothing was found. I am not running as administrator thus cannot be infected by rootkits.
SilthDraeth - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Not running as admin is definitely safer than running as admin, but it does not make you immune to being infected by rootkits.PianoManDan - Saturday, July 9, 2011 - link
I know this topic is a bit old, but I've just come across it as I'm looking into this board as a change to my current setup.Firstly, my use is quite different, and a bit specialist. Hopefully, even though this topic is over a year old, someone will be able to offer some advice.
My PC is used for Mobile Audio work, as well as a home server with multiple virtual machines. I would like to take advantage of my current equipment and also use it as a relatively decent gaming machine.
I currently have an i7 870 CPU which I'm using with Gigabyte mATX board. It was in a 2U Rack case (because of my mobile usage), and as the 870 doesn't have on-board graphics, I'm using a Low-Profile ATI 5450 1GB GPU.
I've just switched to a 1U Case, which mounts the GPU horizontally instead, making room for a full size GPU. This does mean though that the GPU and heatsink is on top of some PCI & PCIe Slots on the mATX board.
I'm looking at an ITX board instead so the extra space is available for the HSF on the GPU, plus it means I can hopefully take advantage of a full size, better GPU that will be good for gaming. It can't be dual size though (2 PCI Slots in height). I'm not after anything amazing - but just to comfortably manage modern games with good detail.
So, now you understand my usage, my questions are:
Can this board handle relatively decent gaming?
What GPU would you recommend without being overkill for this MB?
Long-winded I know - but sometimes you need to know the uses before you can comment and make a suitable recommendation. I appreciate any help anyone can offer.