DigitalStorm Enix: Phenomenal Cosmic Power, Itty Bitty Living Space

DigitalStorm's Take

I got in touch with DigitalStorm to discuss my concerns about the processor voltage, and after a bit of back and forth and discussion with Anand, we felt it would be best to include a statement from them:

Dear Dustin Sklavos,

Thank you for taking the time to recently review our Enix gaming system. We greatly appreciate your thorough attention to detail and are very interested in the voltage concern that you discovered while stressing the CPU.

After further testing at our facility, we were able to lower the offset voltage slightly while maintaining stability, but we quickly hit a stability wall while running our stress-test suite of LinX (AVX binaries with SP1) and Prime95. The Asus P8P67-M Pro does not have fine value adjustments for CPU Vcore, load line calibration, PLL overvoltage, phase control, and duty control. Without the option to enter exact values on these adjustments, a higher CPU offset voltage was needed in order to successfully pass our stress-test suite.

From our experience, the constant load voltage range of 1.45V to 1.48V from a Prime95 CPU burn-in test on the Enix at 4.7Ghz is an ideal range for the long term stability and performance of a system that is overclocked to almost 5GHz. In the past, when we’ve tried to use the absolute bare voltage necessary to achieve stability, a processor overclocked to 4.7GHz+ may become unstable after a month or two. Taking that into consideration, we want to ensure our customers receive a long-term stable system. The Enix is also configured to only supply that much voltage under the most extreme stress conditions. Under normal web browsing or gaming, a system will never experience the same stress conditions.

In addition, to ensure all of our current Enix customers are protected, we are automatically extending warranty coverage for any CPU related issues for up to 10 years from the date of purchase.

I am glad to hear that our Enix passed all of your tests with flying colors and that there were no issues with the stability of the system. I appreciate your feedback as it is always helpful in improving the customer experience at Digital Storm.

Regards,

Rajeev Kuruppu

Product Development

And there you have it. While I still have my reservations, at the very least DigitalStorm is willing to stand behind the overclocks on their Enix line and I'm not sure how much more we can really ask. Overclocking enthusiasts should be well aware of the long-term stability issues that frequently crop up, and as they point out they felt a bit more voltage would be best over the long haul. If you're comfortable doing the tweaking on your own, that's fine, but for a vendor that doesn't want to see flaky system returns after a few months we understand their approach.