Gigabyte H55N-USB3 LGA 1156 Mini ITX Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

After testing the H55N-USB3’s gaming and overall performance capabilities, we thought it would be a good idea to test how well this board can overclock our i7-860 processor. We’ve had this CPU overclocked to 4 to 4.2GHz on air cooling alone, so it will be interesting to see how well our Corsair H50 watercooling unit with a push-pull fan configuration handles overclocking on a mini ITX platform. 

As with all of my overclocking efforts, I like to go into the BIOS and make a few initial configurations that will help us get the best overclock we can. It also provides us with a baseline standard to work from when we evaluate the overclocking capabilities for motherboards at PC Perspective. Here are a few of the major settings we configured during our overclocking session with the H55N-USB3:

– Set CPU ratio to 20x
– Set DRAM Frequency to Auto
– Set Load-Line Calibration to Auto (improves VDroop)
– Disable Intel EIST (SpeedStep)
– Disable C1E Support (power-saving feature)

After those initial steps were completed, I dropped the CPU multiplier to 20x and starting increasing the base clock until I noticed stability issues. We ramped up the FSB all the way to 215MHz before stability started to break down during testing. We backed it down to 199MHz and re-ran Cinebench several times to ensure the cores could run at 100 percent without any stability problems before we considered our overclock a success.

At the conclusion of our testing, we were able to increase the base clock to 199MHz and the DRAM frequencies to 1670MHz, which helped us get to a stable 3.98GHz on our i7-860 processor. See below for more details on how we overclocked the i7-860 using the P55M-UD4 motherboard:

This screenshot of CPU-Z was taken when we achieved a 3.98GHz overclock on the Gigabyte H55N-USB3