Massman

I was promised one. But for some reason it is not arriving. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So I assume we can remove this score then? http://hwbot.org/submission/1083355_dragonfly_superpi_core_i7_extreme_980x_6sec_234ms

One last thing. The current BIOSes have this annoying issue that whenever the board doesn't like any of your settings, be it temperature, bclk, voltage or anything else, it'll lock itself in x12 CPU ratio. I tested this board with ln2 and anything below +15°C caused the x12 ratio trigger. The workaround is rather easy though: 1) go in bios 2) set all the ratios/voltages/frequencies you want to run at 3) check if temperature is above 15°C 4) save and exit 5) the board will now do a hard reboot (shutdown and power up) 6) go back in the bios 7) drop temperature 8) exit without saving the settings 9) boot in os As long as you don't have the board shut down (by changing a bios setting or hard crash), the x12 bug will not occur. Once you do have a hard crash, you're royally screwed though! In general, I'm quite okay with this board. Although there are several obvious issues, this board is actually behaving much more logically than MSI boards did in the past (who can remember P45 series!!). Also, all the issues I've come across behave on a consistent basis and seem very 'easy' to fix. With the PLL override trick this board could actually do more than the other boards I've tried so far (I didn't test the R4E yet!), so ... yup, seems to be okay. Expecting BIOS updates to make the life of the OCer more easy!

No worries, it doesn't work on the UD7. The board doesn't hard reboot that often. Maybe that's one of the issues.

Or one of the two ... too lazy to test which one exactly. No issue stability/oc-wise.

Okay, found the performance issue. Just disable both Channel and Rank Interleaving in Advanced Memory Settings. Before After Comparison with GD65

Yeap. Also, you no longer have to enable turbo mode in CPU Features to get over the default 37x multiplier. Boot-up feels smoother too. //edit: still the same weird performance bug (losing 7~9 seconds on 32M compared to GD65) and I haven't found the key to +4.9GHz yet like on the GD65 8D.

Testing the PLL trick on MSI board under cold. Wasn't able to do this on the Sabertooth. Though, need more testing to know it's the trick and not just disabling the cores .

We have a dedicated subforum for R4 : http://hwbot.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=78 There are two main threads in that subforum: - one for suggestions: http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26812 - one for bug reports: http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26811

Isn't the whole point of being an enthusiast that we try to figure out bottlenecks and work around them if necessary? CPC comparisons at overclocked speeds, max clock performance comparisons, performance scaling articles ... they're all meant to have greater insight in how the platform behaves and how it works. Most power users find some issues and try to solve them. For instance, I spend a lot of time on Bulldozer 3DMark11 to find out there's something strange with memory divider and memory performance. OBR saw there is something strange in WinRAR with the Intel CPUs, so he found out what the bug was. That's just what being an enthusiast is all about. For regular people, I'm sure someone will just make a patch and people will use the patch if it gives massive performance gain. In the past, we've all updated our OS with patches to gain performance ... Link?

"Core Engine Speed" = MSI's way of saying PWM frequency . Enhanced Turbo, by the way, is the feature that locks all cores to 39x turbo.

- MSI X79MA-GD45 --- V1.0: download - Ecs Elitegroup X79R-AX --- B10A: download --- A17A: download - Foxconn Quantumian1 --- B47F1P01: download

Last one for today. Tomorrow I'll have a look at how the board acts under cold. So far, though, I'm pretty happy with the board. It does need a few hours of BIOS 'burn-in' (setup adjusting to SPD etc), but after a while the board is actually starting to act logically ... more than previous mainstream MSI boards did! It's a pity my CPU can't do very high memory frequenies at the moment, so it's hard to test this board's capabilities. Anyway, got a bit of reporting to do as well ... some bugs need to be squashed still.

Hm, might be the exact same bios. Can you make a dump from the BIOS on your board (M-Flash => save bios) and upload it somewhere to compare ? Just used default name.

Almost done fiddling around with this board on air.

According to Asus, the Xpander is actually retail. So, as we follow the decision of the vendor, it is allowed.

Heh. Funny how some people forced reviewers to also test Windows8 because that scheduler would unleash "full potential" of Bulldozer. But now that a simple reg key can unleash SBE power, it's not allowed to use it .

Lol, Flanker. That's just BS.

Thanks. For those who don't know, V1.X has all fixes and updates from V1.Xby. So, V1.2 is the official release with all fixes in V1.2b1, b2, b3, etc. I was hoping the updated microcode would include the PLL override fix trick, but it seems it doesn't.

Haven't re-tested any other board with this trick. I have a gut-feeling that this trick will work on any board (UD7, Sabertooth), but it only affects ES chips and not retail. Remember how the PLL override setting did nothing for ES samples on LGA1155?

You're now the Team Captain of your team!

5200's bluescreening for some reason.

Okay, 5G booting in OS now. Here's the trick: 1) go in BIOS 2) set 48x ratio, set PLL override to enable 3) save settings and reboot 4) go back in BIOS 5) set 50x ratio, keep PLL override at enable 6) save settings and reboot 7) go back in BIOS 8) set PLL override to disable 9) save settings and reboot Now it should be possible to go in OS higher than before. Before I found this, my maximum boot was 4800. The I got 4900 by disabling the pll override, but 5000 didn't work straight away. Now I have 5000 by doing the trick described above. Maybe more (testing now //edit: 5200 boot in OS now). I think this trick will work on the UD7 as well, perhaps on every single board aside from the R4E (lol). Please report your findings! Edit: I'm particularly interested in ES vs retail chips. It's possible this is only an issue with ES chips.

Got 4900Mhz instead of 4800MHz by disabling pll override. But it's not a solid solution as I'm now stuck at 4900MHz. Something's weird about this setting ... Anyway, board seems to be way more efficient than the UD7 for some reason. I'll get the UD7 back on the testbed and check if there's a bandwidth issue of some sort. It's probably me who missed something in the UD7. User error!! vs

You can't use Engineering Samples for this competition. All samples must be retail.