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Choosing the Best H55/H57 Motherboard

@ 2010/02/01

The only way to get dual GPU capabilities from Clarkdale CPUs is to use them in a supporting P55 motherboard. Weird, no? The segregation would make sense if Intel offered the H55 and H57 chipsets to vendors at a substantially reduced price in comparison to P55. Clearly, that's not happening at present, as the H57 costs $3 more than the P55 before you've even put a component on the motherboard.

So where does this leave H57? The only thing it has to offer Clarkdale is a few extra PCI-E lanes, two extra USB ports, and RAID. If you're going to use the IGP, you don't really need the extra PCI-E lanes, which essentially means that you're paying for the option to run RAID on the H57 PCH. We also fail to see the attraction of running a Lynnfield processor in an H57 board; the H57 boards would need to come in at least $20 cheaper than entry level P55 boards, or offer some form of performance enhancement for it to start making sense.

Comment from Massman @ 2010/02/01

220MHz BCLK with IGP enabled

Comment from Massman @ 2010/02/01

BTW, already got upto 220MHz BCLK

Comment from Massman @ 2010/02/01

Working on the article and gathering last tests ... there's more to it that what I had in mind first, but then again I did expect it to be more difficult

Comment from thorgal @ 2010/02/01

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmke

I request a counter article outlining this :-)

ok, so what's going on

? It's not like raja is a greenie so I bet he would like to know too

Comment from Massman @ 2010/02/01

I actually have my mails to Gigabyte as some sort of explanation. It seems even Gigabyte doesn't believe what I'm trying to point out and are asking for "more evidence" ...

I do their R&D, give them the solution for free ... and I have to prove it

Comment from jmke @ 2010/02/01

I request a counter article outlining this :-)

Comment from Massman @ 2010/02/01

Reviewer did not do propper research:

Quote:

We've run out of time to explore every angle of IGP performance and QPI ratios in this article, but we will endeavor to cover this angle in a future article if need be. Right now, we'll say it appears that you're going to be BCLK limited south of 170 MHz with the IGP in tow. Subtract another 20MHz off that for 8GB configurations, and bear in mind that you'll need to use low memory speeds, capping you to a maximum of around DDR3-1333MHz with things in their current state.

200BCLK with IGP enabled is not a problem if you know what is causing the instability. I'm disappointed that SO few people actually know what is going on ...

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