Everything’s under controlThis may come as a surprise, but we like buttons. Big black glossy buttons with various symbols, and the ones with ‘4G’ printed on them... they’re extra special. But this specific button is actually a toggle switch. It’s story time, folks.
It all started when we first booted the motherboard. The retro BIOS splash screen greeted us as we mashed the Delete key to get into the goodness inside. After making our minor adjustments (4.5GHz minor), we hit F10 and waited for the lengthy moans and groans of the system, before finally booting into Windows... at 4GHz. That wasn’t right, perhaps someone hit the special 4GHz button? So off we went back into the BIOS, readjusted our settings and rebooted. 4GHz again. After spending a decent amount of time updating the BIOS, and scratching our heads (while mumbling obscene memes such as Y U NO LIEK HERTZ?!), the problem became apparent. The 4GHz button is a bloody toggle button! So if it’s lit, then expect your settings to be continuously overwritten on boot until you hit it again! Moral of the story? Don’t touch buttons (also: RTFM).
But we digress. There’s more buttons to play with, including two sets of ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons which adjust the CPU multiplier (ratio) and BCLK respectively. A ‘gear’ button toggles the increments of these plus/minus buttons between 1MHz and 0.3MHz. Power, reset, CMOS reset buttons, and the ever-handy debug display are also present.
Owning an overclocker’s motherboard means sacrificing the features builders often take for granted. Ports are limited to prevent overhead, so you’re limited to two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, and a single LAN port on the back panel. There are also eight SATA ports, two of which are 6Gb/s.
But does it play...Miley Cyrus? Sure does, with its 0inbuilt Realtek ALC889 codec. Nothing particularly special, but you can’t exactly listen to tunes while breaking records! But the playing we really had in mind was overclock-oriented.
With our goop-laced 990X strapped in, we aimed to topple our previous 4.8GHz achievement. Naturally, we dived straight into 4.8GHz, and tweaked our voltages to get it Prime95 stable at 1.487v (1.475v idle, 1.502v load). QPI voltage was set to 1.275v to achieve this, with level 2 LLC. Being an overclocker’s board, we pushed as far as we could manage. We finally broke 4.9GHz stable at a sizable 1.55v vCore without touching the QPI voltage. Nice!
We’re glad this board has a very specific market in mind, because it makes it much easier to recommend. If you’re looking at getting your best shot at breaking some records, then you simply cannot look past this board. We’re hearing that this will retail at around $400, so while it’s not cheap, it’s a fair price to pay for what is essentially the board for overclocking on the X58 platform. Now, to source some LN2...
Issue: 137 | June, 2012