Overclocking
| BIOS Frequency, Voltage and Timings | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional | Asus Sabertooth 990FX | ECS A990FXM-A | Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 | MSI 990FXA-GD80 | |
| Reference Clock | 150-500 MHz (1 MHz) | 100-600 MHz (1 MHz) | 190-400 MHz (1 MHz) | 200-500 MHz (1 MHz) | 190-690 MHz (1 MHz) |
| CPU Multiplier | 8.0-31.5x (0.5x) | 4.0-35.0x (0.5x) | 2.5-23.5x (0.5x) | 7.0-35.0x (0.5x) | 4.0-32.5x (0.5x) |
| DRAM Data Rates | 800-1866 (266.6 MHz) | 800-2400 (266.6 MHz) | 667-1866 (266.6 MHz) | 667-1866 (266.6 MHz) | 800-1866 (266.6 MHz) |
| CPU Vcore | 0.60-2.00V (12.5 mV) | 0.68-2.08V (6.25 mV) | +0 to +500 mV (50 mV) | -0.06 to +0.60V (25mV) | 1.08-2.05V (~10.5 mV) |
| CPU NB | 0.60-2.00V (12.5 mV) | 0.50-1.90V (6.25 mV) | Not Adjustable | -0.06 to +0.60V (25mV) | 1.00-1.82V (~11mV) |
| 990FX Voltage | 1.11-1.66V (10 mV) | 0.80-1.51V (6.25 mV) | +0 to +500 mV (10 mV) | 0.87-1.98V (5 mV) | 0.96-1.39V (~5.5 mV) |
| DRAM Voltage | 1.25-2.07V (10 mV) | 1.20-2.50V (6.25 mV) | -30 to +600 mV (10 mV) | 1.03-2.14V (5 mV) | 1.20-2.45V (~7 mV) |
| CAS Latency | 5-14 Cycles | 5-19 Cycles | 5-14 Cycles | 5-14 Cycles | 5-14 Cycles |
| tRCD | 5-19 Cycles | 2-19 Cycles | 5-19 Cycles | 2-19 Cycles | 2-19 Cycles |
| tRP | 5-19 Cycles | 2-19 Cycles | 5-19 Cycles | 2-19 Cycles | 2-19 Cycles |
| tRAS | 15-40 Cycles | 8-40 Cycles | 10-35 Cycles | 8-40 Cycles | 8-40 Cycles |
All enthusiast-grade motherboards provide a wide enough range of voltage controls to fry our processor, and a wide-enough range of frequencies to make our processor completely unbootable, even before we have a chance to fry it. Yet, our tests target long-term stability, and that’s why we choose a maximum 1.40 V at the CPU core for our overclocking efforts.
Gigabyte leads Asus in maximum CPU overclock, but we still preferred overclocking with the Asus Sabertooth 990FX due to its ability to set a target voltage in firmware. The 990FXA-UD7 forces us to chase the appropriate voltage by increasing core offset and retesting until the desired voltage level is achieved.
ECS appears to beat ASRock, but we were not able to do this with firmware. Because AMD Turbo Core was always enabled, getting a consistent clock required the use of AMD Overdrive. We further had to make adjustments in Overdrive at every reboot, making the 4.30 GHz clock rate unacceptably cumbersome to use.
MSI’s low score was caused by voltage drop that resulted from MSI’s voltage compensation mechanism removed from its first AMD Bulldozer firmware.
The Sabertooth 990FX achieves the highest CPU reference clock, which is a setting that achieves its greatest significance when used to overcome the limits of locked multipliers (which, incidentally, none of the FX processors suffer from). MSI’s apparent misfortune is caused by boot failures whenever we attempted to manually lower its CPU-NB ratio, which climbed past the edge of stability in “Auto” mode as we pushed up the CPU base clock.
Asus must not have gotten the message that AMD’s FX has no DDR3-2133 ratio, as this is the setting it uses to achieve a class-leading DDR3-2205 data rate. Gigabyte forces us to make our push from the DDR3-1866 ratio by increasing reference clock, and both Gigabyte and MSI even drop that capability with four modules installed.
How is this relevant to enthusiast? Bulldozer is out classed by Sandy Bridge I don't care if there are a few less sata ports. If you need to upgrade your better off going with Sandy bridge and z68 or p67 or wait for SB-E and X79.
thanks for this article. I was waiting for it since some guy said that the 8150 was performing badly because of the mainboard used, but now I see that that was not correct.
nice thorough review.
but great chipsets cant offset poor CPU's.
let the amd bashing begin...
Yeah If were to buy this boards would be with a Phenom real 6 core CPU 1100T
that is the smartest choice. I think.
What about asus 990fx crosshair v formula motherboard?
I would wait till next year to decide. I still feel that windows 7 aint optimized for BD.
First off, thanks for the great article, good to see Tom's is keeping up the top notch quality!
Secondly, I would really like to see a piece on extreme CFX/SLI configurations on rigs like this. It seems an article with reliable information on this would be beneficial to gaming enthusiasts, IT professionals, and HPC builders alike!
Hope to see an article along these lines soon!
I bought the Sabertooth during the summer and I can attest to how amazing that board is. It's really nice, lots of features and high quality. I'm running a Phenom II X4 970BE @ 4.3Ghz on water right now. Absolutely wonderful system.
What a bunch of pretzel logic we have in this article.
So, x58 is irrelevant, because SB beats it. Except AMD's offering is somehow relevant even though both x58 and SB beat it. What?????
If you ignore x58 because SB offers better performance, you ignore anything AMD has because a SB setup offers better performance. If you want 36 or less lanes, x58 still offers better processors than you can hope to get from AMD. Bizarre logic.
Not that AMD is irrelevant, just the logic is badly flawed.
Want to know if 990's abundant pci lane give significant benefit over z68 in gpu bottleneck scenario (SLI or crosfire off course).
What a bunch of pretzel logic we have in this article.So, x58 is irrelevant, because SB beats it. Except AMD's offering is somehow relevant even though both x58 and SB beat it. What????? If you ignore x58 because SB offers better performance, you ignore anything AMD has because a SB setup offers better performance. If you want 36 or less lanes, x58 still offers better processors than you can hope to get from AMD. Bizarre logic. Not that AMD is irrelevant, just the logic is badly flawed.
That's what it looks like after copy-edit.
Originally it referred to AMD's insistence of comparing its FX-8150 to the 990X to prove that the FX-8150 had far better value. The original version of the paragraph referred to that comparison method a sham, and THEN referred to the SB vs BD debate. I guess it's neither nice nor necessary to call the 8150/990X price/performance comparison a sham, so the paragraph was altered to improve it's tone
Fantastic guys! I have been researching which mobo to get the last 2 days for our mod... this saved me a lot of trouble. Asus it is
The Sabertooth is such a good board i love it so much. I even think its the best bang for buck out of the 990FX boards. To bad i could not give such positivism for the Bulldozer.
Hey, that my board
Sabertooth 990FX with 1055t @4.1Ghz on a Noctua D-14. Waitin around for better AM3+ chips..
Dear Tom's,
Please do a Tri-Sli review with 580's in it.
Compare the 8150 @ $279 vs the 2500K @ $215, who would you recommend?
Hint: http://www.hardocp.com/article/201 [...] e_review/1
I have read that the Gigabyte UD5 and UD7 motherboards have vdroop issues due to lack of an LLC unit. There has been a lot of talk about this in different forums with a lot of people getting disappointed about it. When I wrote to the Gigabyte support team they said that they have added the LLC in revision 1.1 of the UD7 motherboard in the review. According to your review you have the rev 1.1 of this motherboard and yet LLC features are missing in the BIOS, so there are still vdroop issues with this motherboard, am I to understand that this is correct?
you use radeon hd 6950 while there is radeon 6970 on a picture
Not bad at all!