My Dual Harper - Asus Z7S WS living review *56K warning*

[STEvil]

Got a line in, waiting for a response now

[MrBean]

Hello Guys,
Ok, some interesting feedback.

As I have discussed in the past, my system became violently unstable at 400 fsb, no matter what voltage levels I would set for Vcore, Vdimm, and of course the chipset and SB.

Generally, my experience with Intel CPUs over the last number of years have been that, once you reach an overclock ceiling, either on air or water, on default voltages, you need to do silly things with the voltage (diminishing returns really), or use decent phase-cooling to get an extra amount of headroom.

Well, trying to bench at 400fsb, the system would well, bluescreen - especially running Prime95 and SuperPI32, this would be indicative of memory-related failures.

I upped Vcore to 1.40 even, no go, same issues, basically 1-2 minutes into Prime torture, keel over and die.

With new Bios 0501, no change there.

I always maintained there is something here not kosher, and several times I received feedback that VTT et al is the culprit...

I am currently running my system on 398fsb, 3.18gig (default 2.66), and everything default, and it is dead-stable running prime95 for few hours, Memtest for a few passes, and even now Linpack 64.

No bluescreens, crashes, nada - I am even browsing while this is going, so.... I will be happy with this result, I am not concerned over the possible (if any) benefit going to 400fsb and 3.20gig, but I'm just curious why this limitation.

Next test would be to undervolt the CPUs, and I am sure they have huge headroom. I still have a feeling something on this board around 400fsb, with 1333 CPUs ain't kosher - and it ain't the CPUs.

I will receive my new SM X7DWA-N (Thanx Movieman) hopefully this weekend, and do more testing on these CPUs - and I am sure they will be good for 3.6-3.8 gig on water.

Something on this board is holding me back - not memory, as it's default 800fsb Kingstons - it may be that somewhere in the deepest recessses of memory-timing land, there's settings that are to aggressive, similar to a couple of DFI boards of days gone by with Mushkin and OCZ sticks.

So yes, my bet is voltages on this board is good, stable, if undervolting a little, incl. VTT

Memory timings though, will explain BSOD's. After all, if one core were to error in Prime95, I would expect to see rounding-errors, et al.

I will keep you guys posted.

The main thing here though, with Bios 0501, much more stable, no defaulting to stock settings, even if still only beta, seemsAsus is finally getting a grip on this tricky board.

To late for some though, but I may just keep this one and vmod the crap out of it once I have the SM up and running.

Please feedback on your experiences to.

See attached screenie.