Overclocking the CPU and Memory
Overclocking on the EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard is a breeze thanks to the well organized BIOS and great chipset cooling that NVIDIA has included. We of course used the included chipset fan in our overclocking test setup and used the same two processors, a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and a Core 2 Duo E6750, which we have used in our previous motherboard tests.Let’s see what this baby can do…
QX9650 – 450 MHz FSB
QX9650 – 490 MHz FSB – Our new top FSB for this processor!
QX9650 – 490 MHz FSB – memory running at 1300 MHz
E6750 – default 333 MHz FSB
E6750 – 510 MHz FSB
E6750 – 510 MHz FSB – memory running at 1310 MHz
Obviously our overclocking results with the EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard are incredibly impressive! I was able to beat my top front-side bus speed with our quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor by 25 MHz; a huge amount in this case! The dual-core E6750 that usually overclocks much higher didn’t have any room in to get past the 510 MHz FSB setting we saw though.
I am fairly confident that with one of the new 45nm dual-core processors, like the E8400 or E8500, you’ll be able to push this motherboard to levels that even the top X38 and X48 boards will struggle to reach.
You can be sure we’ll be testing some super high overclocks with this motherboard once our Wolfdale samples show up.
For testing some memory overclocking, I used the Crucial DDR3 memory that NVIDIA provided that is rated at 2000 MHz.
I am fairly confident that with one of the new 45nm dual-core processors, like the E8400 or E8500, you’ll be able to push this motherboard to levels that even the top X38 and X48 boards will struggle to reach.
You can be sure we’ll be testing some super high overclocks with this motherboard once our Wolfdale samples show up.
For testing some memory overclocking, I used the Crucial DDR3 memory that NVIDIA provided that is rated at 2000 MHz.
By simply setting the BIOS EPP 2.0 option to “Auto” it was able to push the memory overclocking all the way up to 2000 MHz. I am curious how much of this is the BIOS simply recognizing these specific modules rather than any kind of EPP settings, since a look at the SPD data didn’t show anything in the range of 2000 MHz in those profiles. Either way, the ease of the overclock was impressive.
As I also noted in the motherboard layout page, NVIDIA specifically says in its documentation that to get the best performance out of memory clock of 1801 MHz or higher, you should place the DIMMs in the 2nd and 4th memory slots — somewhat odd if you ask me. Based on our SiSoft Sandra scores, that is DEFINITELY the case. NVIDIA claims that the DDR termination on those slots allows the board to better utilize data paths at a faster speed. Sounds more like a bug/issue that was only addressed with this workaround if you ask me, but the results are still impressive.
