With the boards cooling solution, we had high hopes for it in terms of overclocking, and were hoping to at least hit 4.7GHz, but were pleasantly surprised when it surpassed that, and at a reasonable voltage too. We started to tweak the multiplier up from 46 to 47 and on to 48 while keeping the voltage below 1.4V and leaving most of the other voltage settings at their pre-defined auto values and noticed that it didn’t even break a sweat. Once we were happy with 4.8GHz stable, we continued to push it up even further and ended up clocked to 4.9GHz with a voltage of 1.38V with all other settings on auto including ring voltage and SA voltage. This booted into Windows and ran our complete test suite at this speed, which you will see on the next pages.
We did manage to get the board to boot at 5GHz with no issue until we tried to run the combined test within 3DMark 11, where it proceeded to freeze showing us that the system was no 100% stable. An increase in voltage helped a bit, but this lead the voltage to be more than 1.4V which we would not be happy to run in a 24/7 stable environment due to the temperatures the cores would hit under load. Instead, we clawed it back down to 4.9GHz at 1.38V under our Corsair H100i with 100% stability.
I love this board and I’m really grateful to my supplier for donating one to me along with a Gigabyte Windforce GTX 770. I’m really impressed by the audio and now I can finally retire my old Xonar PCI soundcard. Although the board and GFX card are way overkill for my personal use and gaming setup (I’m not as big a gamer as I used to be, I’m much older now & my grandkids take up a lot of my time) I appreciate it non the less.
Audio is better than Xonar DS? ( I guess you have meant that)
That’s awesome.
It has the ability for you to swap around operational amplifiers to tailor the sound to your liking. The board comes with two different value op-amps but I also have a few of my own lying about.
In the past I always had to settle for a board that sported at least one legacy PCI slot in order for me to keep using my aging Xonar D2 soundcard which is far superior to any Realtek or VIA codec chip IMO.
That’s great man! Only very hid end DACs have the switchable op-amp feature, like Xonar Essence One.
I’ve to say I’m impressed!
with the name ULTRA DURABLE on it, makes me feel like im buying a generic autozone part