Building And Tweaking Around A Radeon HD 7970
When cost is the primary concern, parts rarely seem to fit together ideally. So, we were really surprised at how easily ASRock's P67 Pro3 SE and PowerColor's Radeon HD 7970 fit inside the Apevia X-Trooper Junior case. It turns out that the small enclosure is extra wide and designed specifically to accommodate long graphics cards. A little bit of flexibility in hard drive mounting makes things even simpler. Also, the fact that ASRock's board is skinnier than more ATX platforms helped quite a bit. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with a case this small that didn’t cause some misery when it came time to pack parts inside.
The Apevia X-Trooper Junior isn’t without its flaws, though. Two of the motherboard standoff locations simply weren’t threaded properly, and I had to use brute force to jam them in. Moreover, a lack of cable management makes routing leads and then cleaning up more of a challenge. Those are the only two issues that keep me from recommending X-Trooper to friends and family.
More unfortunate is that our off-the-shelf ASRock P67 Pro3 SE doesn't work properly, refusing to run in dual-channel mode. The Mushkin Redline kit that we bought isn't on this platform's approved memory list; however, we tried modules from Corsair and OCZ as well. None of them got our board working the way it was supposed to. Increasing voltage didn’t help, and so we’re forced to run our tests in single-channel mode. This probably won’t affect the game benchmarks much, but it almost certainly will have a negative impact on memory-intensive application benchmarks.
Overclocking
The 3.1 GHz Core i5-2400 isn’t multiplier unlocked, but it does have to operate within the constraints of a 38x maximum Turbo Boost multiplier ceiling. This allows us to force all four cores up to 3.8 GHz.
That would have been a reasonable tradeoff, considering the Core i5-2400's relatively low price compared to Intel's Core i5-2500K. But because many vendors are now encouraging overclocking through Turbo Boost offsets, the technology remains on all of the time without an option to disable it. So, despite our 38x multiplier setting, our processor ended up running at 3.6 GHz in fully-threaded workloads and 3.7 GHz in less demanding tests. That's better than default, but not quite the 3.8 GHz we wanted.
The PowerColor Radeon HD 7970 was more than happy to hit the core and memory frequency ceilings imposed by AMD's Overdrive tool. Stock 925 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory clocks jumped up to 1125 and 1575 MHz, respectively. We also slid the power control setting to +20%, lowering the chances we'd see throttling under load. This specimen might have overclocked even higher, but we've been having some trouble unlocking higher clock rates in the latest version of MSI's Afterburner utility.
