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| by 3oh6 | January 5, 2009 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Extreme Overclocking & Benching Extreme Overclocking & Benching As has been customary with previous motherboard reviews as of late, we decided to take the EVGA X58 SLI for a little spin with some sub-ambient cooling. Liquid nitrogen was the substance of choice and with -196C worth of cooling on tap, we were sure to tame the heat output of the i7 965 Extreme Edition...or were we. First some photos of the preparation before the fun began.    The first step in prepping for sub-zero temps is to remove the retention setup from the EVGA X58 SLI. A big shout out to Intel for finally hearing our pleas and providing us with a removable retention module. That much metal around that much cold just caused headaches in the past and aside from cutting the old 775 retention module off, we were stuck to deal with it. Not anymore with i7 because about ten seconds with a 3mm allen wrench takes care of that problem all together. We then have to prepare a new bottom insulation layer fight off condensation from forming when the temps come down. Despite how tight the socket is on these new LGA1366 boards, insulating is rather simple and turned out quite well for our six hour session. The last photo above is of the soldered leads to the voltage test points, this is done to make voltage monitoring much easier as we don't want to probe back behind the motherboard while running. We simply setup alligator clamps on the ends of these test leads for constant monitoring of voltages throughout the night. With the board all prepped and ready to roll, let's go over the setup with a couple small changes from our previous testing.
There are just a couple changes for the sub-zero benchmarking setup from the rest of the review, most notably the big copper pot slapped on the CPU and the addition of a third GTX 280. The operating systems have also been setup strictly for benching. Before we get started with the few results we managed, here are a couple photos of the two setups used for the benching, the first for 2D benchmarks and the second for 3DMark Vantage testing.   With all the pleasantries out of the way, let's have a look at some of the results.
It is sort of a mixed bag of results. On one hand, we have some decent scores and times. On the other hand, we don't really have anything too exciting. Sure at the time of posting, the 32M SPi time is #9 overall on HWBot.org and the 3DMark Vantage result is in the top 20 HOF at Futuremark for the Vantage Performance preset, but we are still hoping for more out of our setup. We definitely have some work to do and will admit our session was a bit last minute and rushed so OS optimization wasn't the best. The lack of results from a wider range of benchmarks is an indication of weak preparation as well. Keep an eye peeled for results from this setup on HWBot.org, Futuremark ORB, and in our forums...because we aren't done with it just yet.  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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