Overclocking

All of the boards today were able to max out the X6 1090T just shy of 4GHz.  With any unlocked processor, we might get some variances of the highest speed, but none of the boards could push this chip significantly higher than the others.

I like to install and test motherboards in actual cases.  This allows me to get a better feeling of thermals in an average setting as compared to an open test environment.  We also get to see how the boards fit, where components line up, and how spacing could be an issue.

Things were a bit more interesting when testing the base clock speeds.  Most recent 790FX and 890FX motherboards have few problems going over 280 MHz, with some of the more memorable ones hitting 330 MHz and above.  The Asus 990FX was able to go to 333 MHz+.  It really was ludicrous attempting to go faster.  The older MSI G65 board was able to hit 325 MHz with few problems.  Unfortunately, the MSI 990FXA-GD80 was only able to go to 250 MHz.  This is a far cry from the 320+ MHz romp from the older 890FXA-GD70 for that matter.

Auto overclocking was nearly as disappointing for MSI as well.  For all the promise of OC Genie II (it was pretty groundbreaking when the original was first introduced), it failed to deliver.  It went to 3.6 GHz on the processor with the HTT bus running at 225 MHz.  The one nice thing about this overclock was the handling of the memory.  Usually we just see the memory dropped down to the lowest divisor.  In this case the memory was running at DDR-3 1200 speeds.

Note the minimal amount of dust in said case.  I’m turning my life around one dust bunny at a time.  Both boards are about the same size and fit decently in a medium sized case.  As with all recent boards, a dual slot cooler will invariably cover up some of the SATA ports making the rare swap more of a hastle than some would like.

The Asus board in auto OC mode was able to push 3.724 GHz with a HTT clock of 232 MHz.  Unfortunately for Asus, it did pull the memory down to DDR-3 930 MHz speeds.  Even with that issue, I was impressed by how much more the Asus board overclocked the CPU, and it remained nice and stable.

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