Massman

Can you please link me the scores? :-)

Still impossible to submit a new score to the orb?

Ok ... so DDR3 is more performant than DDR2. I don't see why we should split up rankings based on memory type. Agreed, some are more and some are less performant, but ... that's just a part of overclocking: trying to beat more expensive systems with less expensive hardware.

Good news from Futuremark: Please reply to let us know if validation works or not

Adding a box isn't difficult, but making sure the database is useful and flexible is most certainly a worry. After all, we want to be able to withdraw information about the difference in overclockability of different batches AND have this info for more than just the Core i7 series.

Might be something we can arrange, but we need a good user interface for this if we want to do it properly.

Why?

Probably an issue at the end of the 3DMark online hardware matcher. I'll contact FM about this and if there's no quick solution we'll just ignore the FM link limitation

For some reason, the engine thought there was a different and better '2x5870 3DMark05' submission in your profile, so this one lost it's rank (and thus points). I forced the engine to rescan your profile and the points are back.

Intel kind of fails at pushing a credible NDA policy. I've seen/heard quite some Intel employees state that they are trying to nail down the ES samples, but reality tells us a different story. In terms of NDA, AMD still outperforms Intel LOL

I think legal actions can be taken if you buy stolen property, even if you don't know it's stolen.

We prefer not to delete accounts. If you don't want to use HWBOT any more, the easiest way to do so is not log in anymore

An important sidenote to make is that a benchmark generally becomes more CPU dependant the older it is. At the release, 3DMark Vantage was pretty GPU bound (eg: even with HD4890 I don't see a difference increasing 1GHz in CPU), but with the 4xGPU configs the CPU bottleneck is just too great.

Adding features requires coding, coding requires time, time requires money. If money is 0, then time is 0, then coding is 0, then features is 0.

Same amount of work as long as you reply to every suggestion "not possible", "bad idea" or "no time" .

... more people to post their suggestions and ideas

According to a user on XtremeSystems: Anyone care to see if they boost 3DMarks? :-)

Aha, good info there! Unification does make sense, I guess. There are no real features build around 8 cores, just the very base code is present. I guess there's no Thuban microcode inserted into that bios yet. 31.5x is, by the way, the maximum useable multiplier for Phenom-II. I've seen some manufacturers add higher multipliers in the bios, but that's just wasting space. Maybe they work for Thuban - no idea. Aha! Good to know as well. Haven't played with ECC memory since ... Skulltrail, so no idea

Some CPU's are unlockable, no? I remeber using a higher multiplier on my K6/2-350 as well.

http://hwbot.org/article/news/topalof_wins_gigabyte_h55h57_oc_challenge "SniperOZ is the lucky winner of GIGABYTE’s most high-end P55 mainboard, the GA-P55A-UD7, for his P731 entry."

Actually ... you are right! The moment I was writing the message, I already thought The management for six cores has been in the bioses for quite some time (check link in opening post) and can also be found in the MSI 890GXM bios. Also found references for 8-core cpus ... someone an idea? As for the advertised DRAM frequencies ... well ... hehe

Just went through a couple of MSI bioses. No trace of the new DDR3-2000 divider; but several options that indicate 8-core CPUs.

That's the DDR3-1600 divider Coolaler is using. (250MHz * 4) / 1 = 1000MHz

Yes and no. First of all, AMD and Intel first sample the bios to Award and AMI to create a basic bios which contains all the code you need to get the system up and running stable. Then mainboard manufacturers receive the code from Award and AMI, but in most cases without any a lot of added information. So, for instance, it's possible that mainboard manufacturers have to figure out a lot of options on their own (eg: B2B Cas Delay and QPI multipliers). Now, a bios can only hold a certain amount of code, so it's important to not waste space on useless stuff. For instance, you could provide code to support temp readings upto 16 cores, but when there's no CPU release that uses 16 cores, it's pretty useless code. The same goes for the memory multipliers. As said, in the AMD white papers you can find registry keys for different DRAM multipliers on the Deneb, but since these are not supported by the CPUs, or just not interesting (who wants 1:1 with DDR3?), so mainboard manufacturers didn't use space to integrate them. Now, remember: the Asus Crosshair IV mainboard is a high-end mainboard with loads and loads of bios settings. This means that it's very likely Asus will have to make a choice what settings to integrate in the bios; in other words remove all the code which is not going to be used anyway. The fact that some bios strings remain in the bios is significant enough to assume(*) that they will be used at some stage. I obviously don't know what's really going on, so I leave the opening post open for speculation, but I don't think this should all be considered as 'standard' options that will not be used. Also, since you're kinda confirming my assumptions. (*): assumption because it's always possible that an unimportant string has not been removed yet or doesn't need to be removed because there's already space enough.

Since SF3D posted the latest Asus CIV bios on XtremeSystems, I decided to have a look inside the bios to check whether something interesting can be found in relation to the upcoming release of the Thuban series. In the past, I've done this already and it yielded me some decent results back then. This time, again, some interesting bios strings could be found. 3 things to note in this screenshot: 1) It appears that ASUS has integrated CPU multipliers upto 35X, which is higher than the current physical limitation of 31,5x 2) The DRAM frequency multipliers go up to 2000MHz, whereas the highest memory multiplier on the Deneb processors was 1600MHz ... higher memory frequencies possible? 3) ECC support (not sure whether this was already in Deneb as well, just mentioning) Especially the second point seems to be 'real' (I have no idea since I have neither the mainboard nor the CPU) since it comes back several times in the list of bios strings. Do note that there are several undocumented DRAM multipliers for the Deneb as well, but according to the mainboard manufacturers I've contacted, these were hardlocked by AMD. Given that they hardlocked it in the past, I can't imagine they wouldn't hardlock it again if the multiplier isn't supposed to be used ... so, DDR3-2000 might be a real divider? For some reason, ASUS has added bios strings for a processor package containing 8 processor cores. This might just be some leftovers from the server CPU microcode (although that would be strange), so I've got no idea what it means. Maybe I should just be optimistic and hope there will be 8-core AM3 chips in the future (Bulldozer?).