Thoroughly testing the platform
I spent a month with this board running the 6950X processor overclocked with an AIO water cooler by Thermaltake and I also took it sub zero to -110c with my three stage cascade stress testing the motherboard.
Something worth noting first and that is the fact that I have not pressed the BIOS reset button nor has the machine failed to post after bad settings on this board, the watchdog works great if you make a mistake in BIOS. The absence of a power and reset buttons should exclude this board from an overclockers board but that did not slow me down in stress testing. |
Components:
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First up was the AIO and running at 4Ghz was no problem with the fans at stock, I looped Xreme Tuning Utility benchmark (multi threaded stress test) a few times and the CPU was reaching close 80c. The CPU core voltage was set at 1.22v
I made a few changes and strapped the AIO radiator into the cold blast of a modified air conditioning unit that I have on my desk that operates at -6c. I bumped the CPU core voltage up to 1.28v and after a few hours I walked the CPU up to 4.4Ghz to test stability with some 3D applications and XTU. Even with the extra cooling, the AIO could not handle the load from 4.5Ghz and XTU.
I setup at 4.4Ghz, the machines stability was excellent, I did not experience any abnormal crashing at all during the overclocking making this board easy to work with and now that I had everything setup I switched over to the three stage cascade.
I made a few changes and strapped the AIO radiator into the cold blast of a modified air conditioning unit that I have on my desk that operates at -6c. I bumped the CPU core voltage up to 1.28v and after a few hours I walked the CPU up to 4.4Ghz to test stability with some 3D applications and XTU. Even with the extra cooling, the AIO could not handle the load from 4.5Ghz and XTU.
I setup at 4.4Ghz, the machines stability was excellent, I did not experience any abnormal crashing at all during the overclocking making this board easy to work with and now that I had everything setup I switched over to the three stage cascade.
My three stage cascade is a phase change cpu cooler that is capable of -110c with the 6950X processor, and on the Designare I was able to hit a top frequency of 4.8Ghz for stability testing. I was not able to even screen shot anything at 5Ghz with clipped cores. I felt that even though I was increasing the input voltages the scaling towards 5Ghz was limited. I did not push the input past 2.1v as this was more than enough to breach 5Ghz.
I also had trouble with pushing the cache on this chip and I did confirm this is an "OC" socket. I also inquired to the VL# settings were not needed on this chip. My board would only give me 3.7Ghz cache at -110c. This board will do 3.7Ghz on air and absolutely fine for normal use.
I also had trouble with pushing the cache on this chip and I did confirm this is an "OC" socket. I also inquired to the VL# settings were not needed on this chip. My board would only give me 3.7Ghz cache at -110c. This board will do 3.7Ghz on air and absolutely fine for normal use.
DDR4-3733Mhz Quad
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Hitting high memory speeds on the X99 platform is not common and often not possible with quad channel but the engineers at Gigabyte have working the 3400Mhz strap with XMP. In the screen shot to the left is the Designare running 32GB of memory in quad channel at 3733Mhz. The X99 platform is about bandwidth and the Designare delivers huge bandwidth.
I have about 80 hours in testing, loading, different drive configurations, OS changes, benchmarks, and tweaking to really get to know this board. Stress testing at top speed for at least 24 hours in three 8 hour sessions and two weeks at 4.4Ghz giving it every chance to fail or find weakness and I can only find one fault, that being the cache speed issue. This may be fixed in BIOS or I was doing something wrong. Throughout testing stability excellent and like I mentioned about, this board was very easy to work with due to the excellent stability at top speed. I can highly recommend this board as a workstation and I will build a few workstations here at Pictogrpahics as we are updating the graphics workstations. Thanks Gigabyte, Intel, Kingston, Thermaltake, and Galax. |