Ultimate Sandy Bridge OC Guide + P67A-UD7 Performance Review

[sin0822]

Voltage Read Points:
I found these points to be the voltage read points for the board. Now I do not have the Data sheet for the ISL 6366 PWM for the CPU so I just indicated voltage read point off of one of the Core Chokes.
CPU Vcore:


CPU PLL:


QPI/VTT + System Agent:


DDR3 Voltage:



Voltage Read Points VS Software and BIOS and Load Line Calibration:
I took manual Digital Multi Meter readings of CPU Vcore, CPU Vcore LLC 1, CPU VCORE LLC2, QPI/VTT, and DDR3 Voltage. System Agent and CPU PLL voltages were only taken from what is set in BIOS to what I found on the board. Now I did not spend much time on this, so if you find a better read point let me know!


Percent Difference:
Average Vcore percent difference: 0.5% difference
QPI/VTT percent average percent difference: 0.1% difference
DDR3 percent average difference: 0.6% difference
System Agent percent difference: 2%
CPU PLL percent difference: 1.5%

It looks like the Ite voltage monitoring super I/O chip is doing its job. The voltages you should be most concerned with are Vcore and VTT, and they are almost dead on (VTT is really dead on). Now this board is for enthusiasts, so I am sure many will use read points, but software is just fine. You can use the above data on Load Line Calibration to see what level you want to use, if any at all.

Power Consumption:
Here are figures at the socket (the wall) power draw by the PSU, keep in mind that the PSU is about 85-90% efficient, so actual total power draw is about 80-90% of what is stated. Also keep in mind that each of the two GTX570s used has a TDP if 210Watts, so you can subtract 400watts from the load figures to get a rough estimate of board/CPU power consumption. Other than the GPUs, and 1 HDD, RAM, and 2 high power fans, nothing else was powered by the PSU. For load, I used Intel burn Test 8thread maximum level, and Furmark after disabling OCP on the GTX570s, OCP was enabled for all the other tests.


Now I am going to do some estimation. First multiply by 0.85 for the PSU, then subtract 420watts for the GPUs, then subtract 20 watts for the HDD and 10 watts for the Fans. Now these are rough estimates, and the wattage meter is not perfect, I would give these results about 3-5% error. BUT they look fine, stock numbers on the 2600K are good, the stock TDP is 95watts plus motherboard and Ram would be about 117 watts. On the i7 930, TDP is 130watts, and results are 143.3, now that is a little low, but the Kill-A-Watt meter I used isn’t perfect.

But what is perfect is the reduction in thermal leakage of the CPU, these CPUs run at much higher voltage and amperage (most likely) yet run much cooler. Just like the 6-core Gulftown 32nm chips have the same TDP as the 45nm Bloomfields, but the Gulftowns have 2 extra cores. These numbers look about right, and I did need a 1K PSU for the GTX570s. If you are looking to buy this system, it looks like the motherboard is very efficient, with all those power phases you are probably at 90-95% efficient at the CPU socket, based on the efficiency rating of the MOSFETs.