November 21, 201114 yr Just got the board in today and throwing it on the test bench already. The board has been available since X79 launch, so I guess most of you are familiar with all the features. I noticed there are many features such as pcie lanes, usb slots, sata connections, fan headers, audio and more of all that. Now let's see how the clocks are ! Setup - i7 3960X ES - X79A-GD65 (bios 1.2b1) - 4x 2GB Dominator GTX8 - GeForce 8400GS (for now) - Silent Pro M1000 PSU Pictures Just a few, there are far better pictures out on teh interw3bz already so you can check out those! Results - coming soon, stay tuned -
November 21, 201114 yr Author 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
November 21, 201114 yr Author 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 ... 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.
November 21, 201114 yr Author 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?
November 21, 201114 yr Author 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.
November 21, 201114 yr 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? ES? Lexus ES300? lol
November 21, 201114 yr Author 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.
November 22, 201114 yr Author Sooo, does anyone know what this is? http://hwbot.org/blog/wp-content//bios.png "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.
November 22, 201114 yr Author 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 .
November 22, 201114 yr Author 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!
November 22, 201114 yr With R4E you don't need any tricks, you concentrate on what the CPU can do... that's how a board should be. Get R4E and then you will forget everything else
November 22, 201114 yr Author I was promised one. But for some reason it is not arriving. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
November 23, 201114 yr With R4E you don't need any tricks, you concentrate on what the CPU can do... that's how a board should be. Get R4E and then you will forget everything else hehehehe:D
November 23, 201114 yr Pieter, dont make it more complicated than it is. Some ES CPU's just act like that. When we tested those 35 in Sweden we found out, that some CPU's can not boot in to OS with clocks, what they are able to do while you are in windows. You need to boot at 48x for example and just raise multiplier to 53x in windows. No big deal Or did I got it somehow wrong?
November 23, 201114 yr Author Yes, you got it wrong. Without that PLL disable process I cannot boot into windows, but with the process I can. Only works with GD65 for some reason. It's not a big deal, just something interesting.
November 23, 201114 yr did you test with pll OV disabled to begin with? how much lower of a multi weer you left with?
November 23, 201114 yr Author did you test with pll OV disabled to begin with? how much lower of a multi weer you left with? Yeap. The key is to disable the PLL override and not have a hard reboot with system shutting down. And changing CPU ratio always makes the system hard reboot. By the way. When you shutdown the system and power it up manually again (without changing settings), it will not be able to boot into OS again at 50x100. You need to go back into the bios and trick PLL again. //edit: just found out that you don't need to 'disable' it. Just change the value. If it's enabled, you disable. If it's disabled, you enable. LOL!
November 23, 201114 yr Author Quickly tested V1.3 BIOS. DDR3-2400 is now working fine with GTX8 (didn't before). Nice board!
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