EVGA X79 FTW X79 Motherboard Review

As you will have read on the previous page, we did have a problem with compatibility with our non-retail edition 3960k CPU and its overclocking and getting it anywhere over 4.2GHz was a complete and utter nightmare until we realised that the board and C0 stepping were not a match when overclocking. When we popped in our 3930k with C1 stepping we found that straight away without the slightest hitch that the chip overclocked straigh to 4.6GHz by raising the multiplier and giving the VCore a rise to 1.5v.This gave us a prospect that the chip had a fair way to go and we were keen to see how far things would go.

We planned to take things at a gentle pace and by moving the multiplier up one more step 4.7GHz was just as easy as before. When we went to 48x however, we started to have problems, by simply raising the multiplier and VCore, the system refused to boot and so we applied some VDroop compensation and disabled HT technology and this then gave after raising the VCore more to 1.6V a stable overclock that we could work with. At this voltage however the PWM heatsink was very hot and some additional cooling here did help and brought idle temperatures to around the 50 Celsius mark.

We did try going higher by taking the memory out of the equation, dropping its speed right down to 1066MHz and then playing with the BCLK and multiplier together, but the system was unstable and would not in some cases even complete POST before it shutdown. 4.8GHz is a fairly respectable overclock by no means, but for a 24/7 setup we would recommend dropping it down to 4.7GHz where the voltage was at a more manageable 1.5V and to the end user would be far easier to achieve.