dinos22

Hey guys

This thread will be testing in progress for me....you are welcome to post your OCs, issues, success stories...whatever

I've started FSB Testing on my initial run last night eVGA 790i FTW Digital board that the boys over at evga sent for testing :up:.

As you may or may not know i was lucky to test the original Reference 790i ULTRA SLI a little while ago. I'm glad that at least this time i dont have to sit on any info before NDA lifts as i did with the other board hehehe. I will draw comparisons with the original board

Note: I used my IDE benching hard drive with multiple OSes on different partitions that i use on EVERY board i test....................so anything from P35/P45/X38/X48/Skulltrail etc has been tested on these OSes in the past and i had no problems booting and using it on this board. This may worsen the performance slightly but i dont expect it to be too much

I've taken photos of the board and will upload them when i get a chance. I know that my mate Jody will have some professional shots done so i'll give you the amateur photo shoot and he can do his super duper pro stuff later

I've learnt a valuable lesson the other day. Dont use blutac as full motherboard insulation and then normal foam layer up top.......Bluetac will sweat and cause condensation on the board and in my case i got an FF code about half an hour into benching session......my heart stopped thinking i may have killed my gem CPU and this board but they lived after some hair dryer action Zohan style :ROTF:

Test Configuration:
eVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM
(stock board, no mods)
**watercooling NB and simple RAM IC copper heatsinks on Digital PWM (it runs REALLY cool )
Intel Core2 Duo E8600 Q820A599
2GB 2133MHz DDR3 Corsair Dominators :up:
1GB Gigabyte GTX280 Graphics Card
1000W HX1000 Corsair PSU
Corsair Nautilus 500 + Corsair Chipset Waterblock
1hp C-BuZz Single Stage (kayl evap)
160GB IDE Hard Drive
Windows XP Pro 32bit SP3














BIOS Settings for most of the benching session



Initial FSB Notes: OK so after wrestling for a little while with stock bios i came up with 565-570MHz FSB on dual core.....it's "reasonably" stable for benching for my E8600 Dual Core CPU heh. I am not overly impressed with this considering i was able to achieve 595-600MHz with the reference Ultra SLI board a while back however this may be bios related so i will need to flash back to older bios files to see if i can get more FSB...

Initial Power Notes: O.M.G. I love it. This is what this board needed and it's working just beautifully i have to say. I was concerned somewhat of the remarks made by other members how hot Digital PWM runs. Well on my first air run just to be sure i left original heatsink in place and had a temp probe on the bottom of heatsink sitting on top of these Voltera Digital PWM chips.............it ran only slightly above ambient temps :shocked:.....well that was good enough for me to remove stock cooling and just put a couple of small RAM ICs on these and put a fan on it for just in case :up: so that i can watercool the NB.

The other think about this Digital PWM is power delivery. Vcore is just ROCK SOLID! I am now going to miss this technology on every board i test i'm sure as this is the answer to us high vcore loving benchers . I tested this CPU on SS recently on Gigabyte P45 Extreme and could not bench far past 5.5GHz where this one did 5.6......looks as though digital PWM may even give some extra MHz on top end but this is not confirmed yet as i may be benched in different ambients and mounts may have been different between setups

Bios save profile feature doesnt seem to work....that sucked cause i couldnt be bothered writing all the settings down and tried to remember what i did last time if it wasnt booting heh. Luckily these bioses on 790i seem to recover much quicker than any other chipset so it was still fresh in the memory heh


Here are some initial results with first of all 565MHz FSB with 9.5X multipler

32M SuperPi
It wasnt lightning fast but efficient for sure. i wasnt shooting for any special times as you can see since i left timings at CAS8 just for initial round of testing


Aquamark3
I installed nvidia monitoring software here so that i can capture all the settings for my reference....i dont know if it's buggy software or just odd bios but VFSB selected in bios and reported in the software do not match. I selected 1.475v in bios and reported VTT is 1.35v


3DMARK01
My efficiency could have been better and for some reason it wasnt always stable on CL so you can see i've only used the first run heh


3DMARK03
Pretty decent efficiency for the clocks


3DMARK05
once again pretty decent efficiency for the clocks

dinos22

Here are some initial results with first of all 570MHz FSB with 9.5X multiplier


I used nvidia performance software to increase FSB in windows to 570 (memtest was crashing if i tried to boot from bios so i didnt want to tempt faith hehe)

Early hours of the morning....my ambient temps were 15C which was nice for OCing but not so nice jumping around tryin to warm up (i was too lazy to go find a jumper or something hahaha)....hmmm i forgot to mention that i also needed to take a piss heheh

32M SuperPi
as you can see performance scales with CPU/FSB/RAM MHz increase.....> 4 seconds gain


Aquamark3
2K points gain from increased MHz


3DMARK01
once again that CL was first run as it crashed on second go...otherwise it would have been around 102,240 points roughly



3DMARK03
points increase by ~200 points from MHz increase

dinos22

CPU quick max clocks benchmarks

I thought i'd have a bit of fun and increase vcore a bit and go for max MHz on this single stage.

To my surprise i was able to bench at 5.6GHz and was even able to OC to 5.65 but it crashed on startup of AM3.

5.5GHz boot > 328K Aquamark3 run EEK


FSB windows OC to
5.55GHz > 330K Aquamark3 run


FSB windows OC to
5.60GHz > 333K Aquamark3 run
this is at the same efficiency as my Gigabyte P45 run at 6.1GHz
(but i was pretty unstable at that point while benching that P45 board so could have been that)

eva2000

Great info so far dinos That cbuzz 1HP SS is a power house for E8600 @5.5-5.7Ghz capable

digital PWM FTW! Similar boost I got for my E8600 Q820A599 moving from EP45 Extreme to DFI UT X48-T3RS with digital PWM from 5ghz 1MB pi on EP45 Extreme to 5ghz 32M pi on DFI with digital PWM. Usually diff between 1M pi max and 32M pi max ~100mhz, so seems to agree with your experience

are the cpuz voltages reading correctly for the eVGA board ? 5.5-5.6ghz at 1.72v!

dinos22

i have to solder a read point as i was told once i forceflash to older bios volts will differ to selected ones in bios

but as far as i know it should be accurate

dinos22

hey eva2000

have you checked the temps on your digital PWM on that DFI

i was under impression that its those Voltera chips that get hot but someone at XS said it was that other big thingie in front of them which i'm pretty sure i touched at felt no considerable heat to bother investigating

eva2000

You forced flash to older bios ? what was diff between newer bios ?

You mean the 2x CPL labelled areas ?



I place a 120mm fan over the area and haven't had any troubles with temps although DFI digital PWM is rated for 110C IIRC.

But they'll get hotter as you place more load on the cpus, and quad core would make them slightly hotter than dual core AFAIK. I doubt super pi/3d benchmarks put enough load on cpus to matter

dinos22

yeah i had a fan
i was touching the RAMsinks on voltera chips and they were stone cold