Asus P9X79 Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Thursday, March 08, 2012
Benchmarks - Overclocked
As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match. The effective overclock for these tests is a simple 4.3GHz using the built in TPU switch.
When the TPU is manually activated you'll see a green LED light up next to the onboard switch. Had we enabled EPU then both of the LEDs would be active. The large LED in the lower corner simply tells us we have power to the PCB.
When the TPU is manually activated you'll see a green LED light up next to the onboard switch. Had we enabled EPU then both of the LEDs would be active. The large LED in the lower corner simply tells us we have power to the PCB.
We have mentioned before how motherboards like the P9X79 do not come with a debug LED that shows the post codes as the system is booting. While these can be helpful when overclocking they don't help the mainstream user understand what is happening in their system. To address this Asus has implemented a different kind of debug LED in what they call Q-LEDs. As the system is booting a red LED will light up telling the user what part of the board the system is testing. If your system hangs you can identify what is wrong by what LED is still active.
Overclocking Results - CPU-Z
SiSoft Sandra Various Overclocks
Unreal Tournament 3
Crysis
Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare
Overclocking Conclusion
Overclocking the Sandy Bridge E platform is very similar to overclocking on Sandy Bridge with one exception, the baseclock multiplier. Base clock (BCLK) is still tied to the PCI Express bus so you are limited by how high you can go depending on your CPU and motherboard. To further enhance the overclocking experience Intel has added a BCLK multiplier allowing you to fine tune memory frequencies and system clock
We might get a little crap over using the TPU for our overclocking results with most users saying it isn't representative of what the board can really do when you sit down and really overclock it. They would be correct and the reason we did the scores this way was to address one of the biggest questions we got with the last round of P8 motherboards. "What kind of performance would i get if I just enabled the TPU?"
So while this board is capable of much more we decided to address the question here and save the real overclocking for when we put the Rampage IV Extreme under the Single Stage Phase Cooler.
The charts speak for themselves when it comes to performance. These numbers would have been a little more dramatic had the turbo for this processor not have been 3.9Ghz but we can save those discussions for another time.
We might get a little crap over using the TPU for our overclocking results with most users saying it isn't representative of what the board can really do when you sit down and really overclock it. They would be correct and the reason we did the scores this way was to address one of the biggest questions we got with the last round of P8 motherboards. "What kind of performance would i get if I just enabled the TPU?"
So while this board is capable of much more we decided to address the question here and save the real overclocking for when we put the Rampage IV Extreme under the Single Stage Phase Cooler.
The charts speak for themselves when it comes to performance. These numbers would have been a little more dramatic had the turbo for this processor not have been 3.9Ghz but we can save those discussions for another time.
