ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion (X79) Motherboard Review

Overclocking on X79 is very similar to overclocking under Z77 conditions although the overall performance difference in the real world may not work on the same scale that it does over the more mainstream chip set.

We’ve seen before that our 3960X processor can handle some impressive clocks and given the high end nature of this board, the 5GHz barrier was today’s target of choice.

Heading into the ASRock BIOS, the notion of overclocking turned out to be a good experience with lots of help available for those who are a little new to the concept. The pre-set overclocks help a lot with this, in a click, set and go fashion with a minimal of fuss. We’re pure bred though and its total manual control that we prefer to squeeze every ounce of speed out of the chip that we can.

Normally we’ve had to result to overclocking the 3960X in a mixture of BCLK and CPU ratio mixes, but we found that the chip was more than happy with ramping straight to a 50x multiplier with a not too high level of voltage. We did find that increasing the BCLK at this moment became a bit tricky and a subsequent set of no posts or crashes proved this. We did drop the multiplier back a little in order to clock the chip past 5GHz but we again found it to be a little unstable on the memory front.

All in all though 5GHz is a good achievement and with a stable platform to run on and a good set of temperatures to go with, its time to jump into the benchmarks to see how the board matches up against the competition.