Foxconn Black Ops - Raw, Unadulterated Power
by Rajinder Gill on July 30, 2008 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Subzero Benchmarking Results
Now it's time for the fun part. It's not often we get a board in our hands that allows or even justifies dusting off the cascades. The Black Ops just begs for cold operation and the "Cold Boot" feature in the BIOS should certainly make our lives a lot easier. All of the X38/X48 boards we've had under the cascades so far have exhibited cold boot issues as early as -65C, while total shutdown occurs at around -95C on our processors.
Using the Black Ops with or without the Cold Boot function set to enabled, we managed a clean boot at -111C on the evaporator every time. This certainly saved us a lot of time and made tuning almost too easy. We decided to play it conservative on VTT and stuck to a setting of 1.35V (1.26V real) to 1.42V (1.36V real) throughout the course of testing with the QX9650.
We chose to use our older OCZ 1800 2x1GB kit for these runs, as the older Micron D9GTR parts are adept at running low latency at high bandwidth with high voltages. VDimm was kept in the region of 2.15V, with timings of 7-6-5-19 for most benchmarks at 450FSB.
First up was the challenge of seeing whether the Volterra 8-phase solution could handle a full quad-core load of wPrime 1024 at 1.81V on the processor.
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No problems at all: 5.4GHz and the board pretty much laughed at the load and asked for more. We found ourselves scoring a respectable 3 minutes and 23 seconds using virtually all memory defaults on an untweaked install of Vista 64.
Next up we have some 3D benchmarks using an ASUS 8800 GTS 512 using XP with SP2.
Aquamark3
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3DMark05
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Foxconn was kind enough to send us one of their brute force GTX 280 cards and told us to go wild with it. Even without voltage modification for the GPU, we managed a fairly impressive 905/1295 run of 3DMark06 at 5.4GHz without a glitch. Applying a voltage modification to the graphics card allowed us to scale the core speed to 937 while memory topped out at an impressive 1310 MHz. In all we managed a whopping 27K+ run with a single card, topping most current scores with this card.
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3DMark05 benchmarking followed with slightly reduced GPU clock speeds of 921/1310, providing us with a score of 33565 3DMarks.
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Finally, we managed to increase the CPU speed to 5.537GHz (4 cores active) and obtained a 322K run in Aquamark 3.
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We had planned to use an E8600 processor for further benchmarking but ran out of time for this review. The results certainly would have been interesting, as we have recently seen users benchmarking Intel's newest processor on the Black Ops at speeds of 6GHz. If we do the math, that's around 600FSB at 6GHz, so hardware permitting the possibilities of further benchmarking success is certainly apparent.
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Etern205 - Saturday, August 2, 2008 - link
For those who wonder who is this Shamino person check out VR-Zoneand for those with those Asus ROG boards in the motherboard disc there is a overclocking video with him in it.
at80eighty - Saturday, August 2, 2008 - link
threadjack a hardware thread about Linux?get some sunlight! :p
sprockkets - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Every foxconn board I've had either dies or is poorly made in software. My AMD nForce4 board could not shut down properly every so often, couldn't keep the correct time, and other things.Doesn't mean this board is bad hardware wise. But, if so many of their boards cannot keep the right time or report the right settings, that shows poor BIOS programming. Not wasting my money on the big generic OEM maker.
BPB - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Only 6 SATA and 2 eSATA is not enough. I want at least 8 SATA for a board like this, then start talking eSATA.strikeback03 - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
ICH10R only supports 6 SATA, so not like you could have more than 6 drives in a RAID array anyway. If you really need more drives than that, why not a card?NicePants42 - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
[quote]The water-cooling top plate is anodized aluminum. Contrary to "popular belief", the chances of galvanic corrosion with this setup are miniscule and there should be no cause for concern. Galvanic corrosion can take years to manifest, and a suitable additive in some distilled de-ionized water should provide ample protection.[/quote]I appreciate that the author was astute enough to include specific information about the material of the top plate, however, the reader is left to his/her own assumptions regarding the material of the water block itself - sure, it looks like copper, but so did the cooling solution on the popular ABIT IP35-Pro.
I also find the author's defense of anodized aluminum out of place; if we are to assume (as the article seems to suggest) that only the top plate is made from aluminum, while the rest of the block is made from copper, it seems that the use of aluminum is indefensible, regardless of how technically correct the author's assertions on galvanic corrosion may be. Why, after spending all the money on high quality components, gobs of included 'extreme benchmarking' extras, and a large copper cooling solution, would the designers decide that they couldn't afford the extra dollar for a copper top plate, but would rather introduce the possibility (however remote) of slowly destroying any attached liquid cooling solution?
Galvanic corrosion can take years to manifest? For how many years have people been paying over $120 for PA120.3s? Or $40 for MCW60s? Or $75 for a D5 Vario, etc? I, for one, would think that the author would better serve his readers by questioning the use of potentially harmful materials, (especially when the use of such materials appears to be unjustified) rather than presuming to dictate the reader's priorities concerning such.
iop3u2 - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
I was waiting for a foxconn ad the last few days and you sure as hell didn't disappoint me.tayhimself - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Who needs a $500 Mobo? I am really confused as to the people buying this stuff.NicePants42 - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
It generally helps to check Newegg before posting about price.Considering that many current X48 motherboards are selling between $250 and $300, $330 after MIR is hardly unreasonable for this board.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
"extreme benchmarking"ROFLMAO! What a bunch of losers