Maxing out

The final challenge was to strap a cascade to the CPU and see how far we could push things with the additional overhead sub-zero temps can provide. Those of you into this sort of thing will be happy to know that we found no cold bug bootup limits on the board itself. Nehalem processors are known to average bootup limits in the region of 50-80C. Our retail i920 processors (purchased from Scan UK and Tank Guys) will boot on this board as cold as our smaller cascade will go, which is -95C (sounds lucky at this point does'nt it?).

There is one huge caveat, though: although our i920 CPU boots all the way down to the limits of the cascade, overclocking it at sub-zero temps is another matter altogether. Anything over a reference BCLK of 166MHz on the 20X multiplier refuses to boot. We added a number of shims between the evaporator and CPU to increase the temperature delta to find where this situation begins to manifest. Our saved 195 BCLK x20 multiplier BIOS profile loads fine as long as the CPU is in the positive temperature region. Anything on the negative side and we're stuck at near board defaults for voltages.

The major obstacle for us was that we were limited to using "BIOS-boot only" overclocking. As we mentioned on page 2, the AEGIS panel and the last version of SetFSB did not work properly for us. Had AEGIS panel worked, we would have been able to tinker with voltages at the OS level perhaps providing us with enough room to manipulate the BCLK reference clock to favorable levels. BIOS voltages for the CPU and VTT/Uncore were raised and lowered in BIOS to see if we could get around any kind of current limiting at negative DTS readings; unfortunately, these attempts proved unsuccessful. What we ended up with as workable voltage put us in a worse position than when we were using water-cooling at ambient temps.

It seems we have an i920 processor with an odd cold bug, or perhaps we're seeing what could be some kind of power throttling due to a built-in CPU thermal condition breach. Nehalem monitors processor Vcore at all times and can make dynamic changes on-the-fly in an attempt to rectify temperatures that fall above or below predefined DTS thresholds. Still, this is another story altogether and not something we're blaming the board for just yet. Although we are beginning to see BIOS's on other boards that offer partial workarounds to some of these conditions. A hard modification will be required to the Blood Rage to overcome some fo the current throttling at the PWM end of things, and this is an avenue we will explore. Before doing that, we're going to try out a few more processors to double-check everything and report back in the full review.

After all that effort, it was back to water-cooling the processor, and we managed to get a clean boot at 200 BCLK on the 20-21X multiplier and run 3DMark06 along with several other benchmark programs and applications.



We did manage to get the board to boot at 203 BCLK, but it seems our processor is too VTT hungry (at least on this current BIOS) to scale past this at voltages we'd deem being past intelligent for ambient benchmarking. The i920 series is hampered in this regard by Uncore and QPI MHz limits, although we did try lowering the multiplier/memory speed to work around this without success. Future tests will be compared against a retail Extreme i7-965 CPU to get a broader picture of motherboard capabilities.

It's All About Brawn... Well, Maybe First Impressions
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  • weevil - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    Hope they get it working right.

    Keep up the good work guys.

    Tough crowd huh?
  • badthings - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    from the article:
    "Those that had positive experiences with the Black Ops by using it in the intended manner have been imbibed with plenty of thought provoking fodder to wonder what's coming next from the Quantum Force development team."

    Is 'imbibed' really what you meant?

    Other than that, thanks for the info. (and the laugh)
  • UNHchabo - Monday, January 5, 2009 - link

    http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imbibed">http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imbibed
  • LoneWolf15 - Sunday, January 4, 2009 - link

    I think they meant "imbued". Still kind of an odd way to phrase things.
  • shabby - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    Is it me or will adding a 2slot high video card in the 2nd red slot block all of the usb/sata/ide ports at the bottom?
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    Yet another very expensive motherboard using crap Realtek network parts.
  • Gasaraki88 - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    I can't believe that this article is actually saying that this motherboard is good. ANY motherboard that doesn't work correctly out of the box even when not overclocking is not a working motherboard. Who is going to press that damn bios reset button everytime they want to boot up the computer? Who is going to know they need to do that? People will just assume that the board doesn't work and return it. If manufacturers can't get something that simple right before releasing the board to the public, the people should not be buying their stuff.
  • AlterBridge86 - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    Nice write up, but on the front page, the brief synopsis underneath the title has a typo...

    "The Blood Rage is one of the hottest looking X58 boards to grace out test bench, but what lies beneath the... "

    I believe it should be grace OUR test bench, not OUT :)
  • Rajinder Gill - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    sorry - fixed...

    thx

  • jackylman - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link

    In the Feature Overview chart, you list 6GB of RAM as the max. I'm guessing this is the official Foxconn spec. Later in the article, you claim that the board will support 12GB, though it appears that you didn't actually test this.

    Can you clarify the max RAM situation? Thanks.

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