Z77H2-A2X Deluxe UEFI
ECS' M.I.B. X menu opens to reveal important voltage settings, including CPU core and Vdroop. Setting Vdroop to Disabled allows the system to keep voltage stable under increased load.
With Vdroop disabled, we found that our CPU climbed from 1.15 V at idle to 1.25 V under load using the Z77H2-A2X Deluxe’s 1.15 V setting. That voltage got our processor to a stable 4.69 GHz with all four cores fully taxed.
A mere 1.25 V isn’t enough to push 4.7 GHz from our chip on most motherboards, yet ECS still supported the 47x multiplier. An under-spec base clock of 99.7 MHz at the 100 MHz setting explains this discrepancy.
The Z77H2-A2X Deluxe supports Intel’s XMP technology to ease the overclocking of most DDR3 memory modules. Fortunately, the XMP timings stick when switching from XMP to Manual mode, and SPD timings stick when switching from full-auto to Manual mode.. Thus, we were able to keep our memory’s complete timing configuration while playing with its multipliers. Biostar could learn something from this.
ECS appears to learn from all of its competitors, expanding its overclocking profile storage to support up to eight custom UEFI configurations.
