Testing Part Two: Overclocking
First up, a disclaimer: Overclocking can cause hardware death, instability, data loss, time loss, explosions, smoke, fire, will void the warranty on all parts involved and is generally a dubious idea.
It’s also fun though…
With some work, this is the final overclock I achieved. I set myself a limit of 1.4vcore, but didn’t actually need to go that high. One thing to note is that the slots I chose for the RAM are crucial, the two labeled as 1/2 are the second and fourth out from the CPU, and in those slots my RAM wouldn’t even POST at anything close to its advertised (and tested) speeds/timings. Switching to the slots labeled as 3/4 (the closest to the CPU and the third one back) allowed me to use the same 8-10-7 timings at 2133MHz that the UD5H did. Neither board could do 2133-7-10-7 on these sticks, nor could the ASRock Z77 Extreme6. The TZ77XE4 and ASRock Professional both could though, as could Gigabyte’s P67a-UD4. I’m not really sure what’s up there. In any case, here’s where I ended up:
Much better RAM timings than the UD5H, but not quite as far on the CPU. That said, the CPU voltage is much lower. The overclocking experience itself was good, the BIOS is laid out in the familiar Gigabyte way (unless you go for the 3D BIOS setup, which I don’t like personally), with plenty of settings for everything. For statistical purposes, core speed is up 19% and vcore is up 13%.
SuperPi 1M
SuperPi is 18.7% faster. Not long ago 7.925 was in the top10 ever. Now? Not so much, but it’s still fast.
SuperPi 32M:
32M is 21.8% faster, it likes fast ram. A lot. Other memory intensive applications will be happy with this boards ability to run RAM fast as well.
WPrime v1.55
WPrime’s 32m test is 19% faster, identical scaling to CPU clocks. 1024m is 19.3% faster, RAM helps it a bit. During the 1024m test I felt the MOSFET heatsinks, even with a 100% load on significantly higher vcore and CPU clocks, with no airflow to speak of, the MOSFET heatsinks were barely warm to the touch. I am very impressed by what IR and Gigabyte have managed with this MOSFETs!
3DMark Vantage
Vantage is up 19.95%, nice scaling there.
Cinebench 11.5
Cinebench is up 19.4%, it appreciates fast RAM, but not nearly as much as SuperPi 32m does.
All told I’m fairly impressed by this motherboard’s overclocking abilities. I was quite annoyed when I had the RAM in slots 1/3, once I switched them everything went far better. Do note that different sticks of RAM will prefer different slots! It’s weird and I don’t know why, but it’s also true.
I plan to run this board and CPU with Liquid Nitrogen cooling at some point, if/when I do I’ll post an update.
