This review will also be available in German shortly.
With Sandy Bridge just around the corner, it's time to get some bargains. Manufactures will sell off the "old" stuff and if you are interesting in overclocking the current line-up from Intel is the last chance to do so. The new CPUs will be drastically limited and you would need unlocked editions which will cost you an arm and a leg. Today we take a look at the MSI H55M-ED55, which sports the H55 chipset for current LGA 1156 CPUs.
Testbed:
Motherboard:
MSI H55M-ED55 (provided by MSI)
Intel H55
ASRock 890GX Extreme3 (provided by ASRock)
AMD 890GX/SB850
ASRock H55M Pro (provided by ASRock)
Intel H55
CPUs:
Intel Pentium G6950, Intel i3-530 (provided by Mindfactory
AMD Athlon II X2 240e, 245 (provided by AMD)
AMD Athlon II X4 620 (provided by AMD)
CPU-Cooler:
Scythe Kama Angle (provided by Scythe-Europe)
Memory:
G.Skill 4GB Kit PC3-12800 (provided by G.Skill)
1067MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T 1.30V for Athlon II X2, Pentium G6950
1333MHz CL7-7-7-20 CR1T 1.30V for Athlon II X4, i3-530
Graphics Card:
MSI R4850-2D1G-OC (provided by MSI)
Power supply:
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W (provided by PC Power & Cooling)
Hard disk:
Samsung F1 1000GB RAID-Edition (provided by Ditech)
Case fans:
SilenX iXtrema Pro 14dB(A) (provided by PC-Cooling.at)
Scythe DFS122512LS
Case:
Cooler Master Stacker 831 Lite (provided by Cooler Master)
OS:
All tests are performed with XP SP3. As 64-bit software is still not very common, we stick with the 32-bit version. We will change to Windows 7 when we swap the graphics card for a DX11 capable one.