EVGA X79 Dark Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  To make things a little more interesting we broke out the Single Stage Phase cooler for these tests so we could really dial up the CPU clock. (Sorry no LN2 this round) The effective overclock is 5.1GHz @ 51x multiplier and 100 BLCK. 

Overclocking the Sandy Bridge E platform is very similar to overclocking on LGA 1150 given the inclusion of 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 didn't spend too much time tuning the X79 Dark on Single Stage since we had over a year to mess with LGA 2011.  We already know that this particular chip tops out 5250Mhz under LN2 making the processor fairly typical for a SBE.  Several enthusiasts have found 3930K processors that do 5.7Ghz under LN2 which is actually extremely good and a very rare find. 

Personally we are really looking forward to Ivy Bridge Extreme to breathe some new life into the X79 overclocking effort and if the leading indicators are true we should see some amazing things.  

The charts speak for themselves when it comes to performance, sadly unless you have a Single Stage Phase cooler in your chassis the target frequency in this section might not be realistic in a 24/7 situation.