Hi guys
I did some initial testing, overclocking and tuning and want to share some of the results and findings in hope that it helps some of you get information you need, particularly with the new GIGABYTE Sandy Bridge boards.
I found overclocking fairly straight forward and all the bioses were similar in terms of OC capability. I am on a D1 stepping though so I cant use PLL overvoltage setting you can find in F5x bios (so thats the one recommended for retails).
Ram clocking is pretty good. Once you start to hit the wall a quick bump in QPI/VTT and vdimm does the trick. My chip doesn't like going past 1.24 but there wasnt a need for it as i really only needed to go up to 1.22 in bios for most high clocking runs. Before that high frequency or high capacity RAM clocking will probably require more vtt.
I have also found that overclocking with 2 sticks is better if you install them in slots 2 and 4. This might not be the same for everyone but if you really are trying to push ram, try both configurations and see what works best.
If you are going to be benching and want to push the limits be aware that bios auto recovery feature kicks in very quick with some bioses. If you see that it will go to recovery you can flick the switch on the PSU and clear cmos if you don't want to lose your saved bios settings. Just a heads up.
BTW all the priming was done with the air cooler (before i installed the water) and i can tell you now there was at least a 15C load drop with water and also it managed higher load with ease, i was priming at 5GHz 1.415vcore before i pulled it thinking i dont want this chip to die (at least until i get a better one LOL). This watercooler is awesome for Sandybridge!
There is a mix of a whole bunch of stuff but it still predominantly RAM clocking that's interesting to me at least
Hardware setup:
- GIGABYTE P67A-UD5 (tested F5X, F5e, F5 official, F6a)
- Intel Core i7 2600K
- Corsair H70 Watercooler
- Arctic Cooling Freezer Extreme Air Cooler
- Corsair Vengeance 8GB kit CMZ8GX3M2A1600C8
- Corsair Vengeance 8GB kit CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9
- Corsair Dominator GTX3
- Corsair Dominator GT 2000 C7
- GIGABYTE GTX460OC, 470SOC, EVGA GTX295 (run separately)
- Corsair HX620
- Windows 7 32bit, Windows 2008R2 Server (64bit), Windows XP
Quick OC guide
Thermal paste used
Corsair Vengeance RAM
Air Cooler
RAM Clearance with air cooler
Watercooler
Clearance
16GB RAM Test 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24-1T
I mixed these two kits, not normally recommended by as you can see they are going to run at rated timings even with 4x sticks installed
Corsair Vengeance 8GB kit CMZ8GX3M2A1600C8
+
Corsair Vengeance 8GB kit CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9
16GB RAM Test 1866Mhz 9-9-9-27-1T
16GB RAM Test 2133Mhz 9-11-9-30-2T
It wasnt fully stable at these clocks but just reaching them with these kits is pretty good. Volts were a lot higher so probably not something I would recommend on a 24/7 machine with 1.25QPI/VTT and 1.68vdimm
4GB Hyper Corsair Dominator GT 2000 C7 2133Mhz 7-7-7-21-1T
4GB Hyper Corsair Dominator GT 2000 C7 2220Mhz 7-8-7-22-1T AIDA64 27K read
5.2Ghz 3D tests with GTX470SOC
GTX295 for this bench
Maxxmem at 5.2Ghz
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