Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking your CPU means operating your CPU and motherboard outside of their design specifications, it can cause damage to them or kill them and may void their warranties depending on the manufacturer’s policies!
When it comes to Sandy Bridge-E, overclocking can be more exciting than Sandy Bridge and socket 1155. With Sandy Bridge there are two or three settings you have to worry about in order to set your overclocks and other settings did not make a bunch of difference. However, with Socket 2011 you can take the route of Sandy-Bridge or you can venture off and tweak tons of different things. One of the greatest advantages is being able to set multipliers for Base-clock. With Sandy Bridge you are more or less limited to 110-base clock as a maximum. With SB-E you can hit much higher base clock frequencies.
Stock speeds of the 3930K are 3.2ghz, however most boards will run at 3.5ghz since turbo is enabled by default.Thus stock testing was done at 3.5ghz. For most people that would be more than enough, but for others they want the speeds of 4.0ghz and higher.
If I had access to extreme cooling such as Dry Ice or liquid nitrogen I would have posted much higher speeds. But as-is I do not want to kill my processor with excessive voltages.
For this review I stuck to 1.45v as a limit since that is a decent limit for what most people would consider safe for daily clocks. If you have sufficient cooling 1.4v should be fine for daily use, but I would not advise going much over that unless you have heavy-duty cooling.
Keep in mind that every processor is different so if I am able to hit certain clocks that does not mean you will be able to as well even with the same hardware.
CPUz Info
Setting the board to 1.45v and letting it do the rest I was able to do 4.8ghz. To be fair, I think it might have been using extra load line calibration strength to add more volts. But with no voltage read points on the board I was unable to make sure it was 100% accurate.
3Dmark Vantage
Not quite 48000, but that is within the margin of error.
MaxxMem
I’m not sure if it is due to the different IC on this memory, but it just completely blows the other board out of the water with the same memory settings.
Cinebench 11.5
It appears that the X79 professional is running nice and smooth at 4.8ghz. While it is faster than the X79-UD3 was able to do, keep in mind that it is running 100mhz faster.
Wprime
Being wprime stable at 4.8ghz with 1.45v is quite a feat, this board just continues to impress me throughout testing.
Memory overclocking was great with this board. I was able to run multiple different sets of memory with ease on this board. For those of you that have memory with Hyper IC rejoyce since you will not have any issues running them at all on this board. While you cannot tweak some of the obscure subtimings the board does so for you. I had no issues at all running my Dominator GT v2.1 sticks at 7-8-7 timings at 2133mhz.
