Asrock A330ION motherboard reviewed

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This review is originally in French. (Google Translation)



The Asrock A330ION was compared to the Intel N330, Gigabyte N270, Via NANO, Intel GM45 with E2160 and the ASRock Nettop ION330.




The benchmarks that were tested are PCmark 2005, 3Dmark05/06, WinRAR and Street Fighter 4.



The A330ION can be overclocked as well, the CPU-Z result for the atom 330(stock speed 1.6GHz) was 2004MHz (12x167), more than 20% !




In the WinRAR bench it proved to be better than its competitors the ASRock A330 with 112 seconds was ahead of the Intel N330 with 139 seconds,the gigabyte N270 with 170 seconds and even ahead of the ASRock Nettop ION330 that comressed the files in 114 seconds, this is because the the Nettop has DDR2-800 memory while the Asrock A330ION has DDR3-1066 memory.

In the Windows Experience Index it had a score of 4.0 which can be considered quite good.




PROS:
Layout, overclocking, power consumption and performance.

CONS:
Noisy fan, Price.

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ECS H55H-M Linux Review

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First Linux tests of the ECS H55H-M and Core i3 530.




Actually phoronix made two tests, one about the ECS H55H-M dealing with the BIOS, board and test setup, the other is about the core i3 530.




This board not compared to another board, instead the core i3 530 is compared to the Core 2 Duo E8400 and the Phenom II X3 710 in the benchmarks, and it runs fine with Linux distributions employing a recent Linux kernel.




7zip benchmark results with the Core i3 "Clarkdale" show 7127 MIPS, the Core 2 Duo E8400 reached 4949 MIPS, while the Phenom II X3 710 ended up with 4213 MIPS.

This motherboard has no DisplayPort or HDMI, which can be considered a disadvantage, besides that the expansion capabilities are few.

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Gigabyte launches the GA-P55A-UD7

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Gigabyte launches its high-end mainboard in the P55 lineup for motherboard enthusiasts. Next to three-way Nvidia SLI support it has more bandwidth and power stability.


The 24 phase Voltage regulator module takes care of stability in case of (extreme) overclocking, the VRM is cooled by the Hybrid SILENT-PIPE 2 with liquid cooling. Benchmark results with SuperPi had a result of 5.944 seconds with a core i5 670 that reached an incredible 7098MHz, the cpu cooling they used was the liquid nitrogen ln2 cooler.


The Nvidia nForce 200 bridge chip takes care of the extra PCIe lanes, so you will be able to use USB3 and SLi/CrossFireX at the same time.

Allthough the SATA6 drives are scarce, with the 2 SATA6 connectors you're ready for future SSD Drives.




More on gigabyte.com.tw

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Gigabyte H57M-USB3 and Pentium G6950

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Chinese site coolarer.com has tested the Pentium G6950 together with a Gigabyte GA-H57M-USB3 mainboard.


This 'test/review' starts with some images of the CPU and board, there are also images of a Falcon USB3 2.5 inch superspeed drive and a picture of the test setup with the NV120.


The screenshots with the HyperPi Calculation indicate a speed of 4200.5 MHz, a BCLK of 200MHz and QPI link of 2800.4 MHz. The cooling was done with a Zerotherm Nirvana NV120.



The IGP results with 3D mark 2006 were 1909 3Dmarks, there's also a BIOS screen were the input in MHz(max 1200 MHz) is shown for the for the Internal Graphics Clock.




The HDTune testing of the Falcon USB3 2.5 drive resulted in an average read of 94.8 MB/s which is app. twice the max speed of USB2 (theoretically 50MB/s), the burst rate was 125.0 MB/s.

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ASUS has launched the P5G41TD-M PRO with DDR3 memory.

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Asus claims that with a new series of cheap AMD 7025/630a and Intel G41 mainboards it has the Lowest Electromagnetic Emissions in the Industry.

1. Elimination of Harmful Electromagnetic Rays with Low Radiation Design: electromagnetic radiation exposure for users is reduced up to 50%.
   
   
2. Enhanced Component and System Longevity with Anti-Surge Design: protects you from thunderstorms andf unstable grid power.
   
   
3. Superb Efficiency and Eco-friendly Operations with EPU Energy Saving Design: Power consumption will be reduced up to 80.23%.

The reduction of Harmful Electromagnetic Rays is not mentioned in the P5G41TD-M PRO specs,
it was announced in an official news item on 2010/01/29 by ASUS on their website.


The P5G41TD-M PRO has an onboard EPU chip but has no additional software like EPU4/6 that is usually shipped with more expensive boards.

We wonder what the PRO means, usually his indicates better overclocing capabilities but the vCore voltage can still not be altered, only the Base Clock (FSB tuning) can be tuned from 200MHz to an 'incredible 800MHz'.




Official Specs: ASUS site

P5G41 Review: motherboards-reviews.com

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ECS H55H-M reviewed

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Two major sites reviewed this mainboard with the H55 chipset.



ECS is well known for its cheap motherboards, a while ago they merged with PCChips that sells extremely cheap boards.


From a H55 motherboard you would expect the latest connectors like DidplayPort and HDMI, but this motherboard lacks both.


If you're looking for any overclocking results both reviews are a bit disappointing because they did not produce anyof those results, they have some screenshots of the BIOS and that's it. You'll have to wait for more reviews who will hopefully tackle this subject. A close look at the images shows a 4 phase power supply (VRM) without any heatsinks, so don't expect to much.

Clarkdale processors have their own IGP called GMA HD, the H55 routes the IGP via the Flexible Display Interface (FDI) to the connectors.

Official Site : ECS

Reviews : guru3d motherboards.org

ASRock H55DE3 Motherboard

The ASRock H55DE3 is a new Intel H55 mainboard with a full ATX factor. It Supports ATI CrossFireX, but the second slot runs at x4 mode.

When compared to the H55M Pro, Gigabyte H55M UD2H, Intel DH55TC and the MSI H55M E33 in Cinebench R10 the H55DE3 had about the same speed as the pro, but was about 4% faster than the other mainboards with a Corei5 661.



The ASRock site advertises the Turbo 50 feature as follows: Simply click the Turbo 50 button in BIOS, the system performance will boost up to 50% increase by automatically overclocking CPU, Memory, GPU frequency and all related voltage settings!

With a Core i3 530 an increase of 36.66% was reached for the CPU, and the GPU(IGP) was even boosted to 50.2% in 3D mark06, all this was done with the H55M Pro, but the results for the H55DE3 should beabout the same.


If you take into consideration the the H55DE3 has a 4 + 1 Power Phase Design, than the 36.66% increase for the CPU is quite remarkable.