Prelim DI testing w/Foxconn Black Ops X48

Had some time during this weekend to mess around with this board...all dry ice for now. The clocks are pretty low all around (kept having video card issues) but the board's power is apparent.

All you guys waiting for the right board to run your CF rig on, look no further. This one is much, much, much more pleasant to deal with than any X38 I've tried. Everything works and scales as it should, and, although I have no complete runs here, it doesn't have any problems in 01 nature unlike plenty of others. Memory and FSB clocking is also very nice. Big thanks to Sham for giving me a chance with it and also this equally sweet Kingston HyperX PC3 14400 RAM. Tek9 3.0's on the cards with the Evo 2.3 still going strong on the quad.

06:


36.1k '05

AM3:


03:


Pretty efficient PiFast and 32M scores-





Now off to find a better CPU.

Nurf Gautam!

That's the best 3d06 score these forums have seen isn't it?

Very nice G,

Now how soon can you send one to New Zealand

Damn nice results Gautam

Glad to see you got your hands on one of these boards. How do you like the conformal? Where's the pics of your card mods? I see we both got a similar 9650, time to talk to Andre maybe.

DARN YOU G!!! Now I want a new motherboard

very nicely done

I want one of these very much. Foxconn is really about to take over the enthusiast mb market with the Mars and now this.

4 day old bios. wow.

Mark I'm finally learning how to solder to the point where doing the card mods was fun. Still sloppy though. I could post them if you really wanted to see them. I'll attend to the irams in a few later tonight. I actually didn't use the conformal...benched for about 5 hours straight with nothing on the cards and amazingly no condensation, it was a very dry day. Honestly they should each do 1150-1170, but something kept getting in the way so I backed down. This CPU is the same batch as yours...specifically asked Ben for a week 39 but I guess that wasn't enough insurance. I don't think Andre is going to want to help you or me.

The retail boards will take care of some of the quirks with this one, for instance they will come with the badass 4-in-1 cooler. This one came with a dinky one, but even with that was waay more tolerant of high vMCH than the Asus ones were. I still wish I could clone it 10 ways and get one to all of you for the wars. I could take the voltage to the sky without a problem on the dinky "stock" cooler, but ATM I've got an MCW30 on the northbridge and am pumping 1.85v thru it. Good enough to get me ~1 GHz benchable mem clocks as such



On the Asus boards I was struggling to pull 900...

And as for the bios being 4 days old, there's actually an even newer one which I haven't gotten around to testing yet lol.

Looking good, time for some 32M domination. Thanks for wanting to help us all out with a board, your a true team player

Here I'll post my cap mod's, now I just need to bench it...wasting juice on the XS challenge

Shiggity said:

That's the best 3d06 score these forums have seen isn't it?

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Yes, #1 '06 by 6K

And not only that

#1 '03 by 9K

#2 Aquamark

#2 Pifast

#2 32M

No to the 06, I apparently used a version thats too old so I can't upload it to FM. And since it would've been 15th place on hwbot, I can't upload it there either.

Dean has lucked out again on that one.

I did that recently, I hate that

El<(')>Maxi said:

#2 Aquamark

#2 Pifast

#2 32M

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Gautam said:

Dean has lucked out again on that one.

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And it's the only thing thats holding you at bay.

620 marks off AM3, that won't be long till it goes your way

Does anyone have a solid date on when these will hit the retail channels? (hopefully before 14 mar????)

Thnx

Wouldn't count on it dude. Probably still about two months away I'd venture. Still plenty of little issues that need to be ironed out.

You're in good hands with the Maximus tho...everything I see with them shows them hitting crazy high mem and fsb clocks. They're just annoying under cold with a -45C cold boot.

I've yet to see the bug on the Forumla, the ***** is running dividers properly or even getting it to boot at times without throwing away all your settings.

El<(')>Maxi said:

I've yet to see the bug on the Forumla, the ***** is running dividers properly or even getting it to boot at times without throwing away all your settings.

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Gautam said:

Wouldn't count on it dude. Probably still about two months away I'd venture. Still plenty of little issues that need to be ironed out.

You're in good hands with the Maximus tho...everything I see with them shows them hitting crazy high mem and fsb clocks. They're just annoying under cold with a -45C cold boot.

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I am very inexperienced with going extremly cold (will be teaching myself soon when Dean's pot gets here)...is there a way to control how cold you go (i.e. slowly pouring LN2 into pot) while booting so as not to reach that critical cold boot point? Or is it easier to control with dryice and acetone?

Hmm, maybe that pertains to the Extreme only. Pedro and Vince both have gotten the Extreme way up there but have both commented on having trouble booting cold. (Pedro with his cascade especially I can only imagine lol) I swear looking at the pics that the Formula and Extreme are somewhat different boards...just look at their respective slot placements.

When I first got the Foxconn, it was an enormous mess like that too, supposedly with pretty bad FSB and mem clocking abilities. I couldn't even tell because I couldn't even set mem timings successfully lol. It didn't like saving settings either. But literally every other day, a new BIOS came out addressing one thing or another. The last BIOS I had used had CAS 7 screaming, but severe issues with CAS 6 and CAS 8. CAS 6 was fixed about the day after I posted those. CAS 8 has yet to be working well from what I hear but I'm sure it'll be taken care of soon. Right now the OCing is about as good as it gets, but there are some annoyances that would bother a non-bencher. You can tell though that the engineers are slaving away at the board day in and day out considering the progress they've made so quickly.

Between us guys though, I was thinking and realized that I'm probably personally happier with these benches than any others I've done...the worldwide ranks are lower than what I usually want to post, but I'm happy about pulling 3 containers together while running a very good configuration, all in one session, with the exception of the cards which seemed to fail to cooperate precisely when crunch time came.

Matt, the temps are easier to control on LN2. The general procedure for running a board with a horrible cold boot such as this one is to boot into windows at around -20C with slower speeds and then setfsb/clockgen up once you're in Windows. Then you're set, provided that you can keep your system going without a crash. Say you're running at -125C though, and you accidentally forget to pour your CPU container at the right time during the 06 CPU test, and it heats up to -120, and your system crashes. Then you're stuck at -120, with the system crashed. it needs to be at -45 or higher to even POST. You can hold out on pouring the CPU container, sure, but its way the hell down there temperature-wise, and since your system is refusing to POST, you can't even load it up at all...so it'll just stay there. Very slowly climbing up. You could sit there for several minutes, during which your board could easily start frosting up and potentially die. This situation is where the true problem occurs. I had it happen to me all the time on LN2 on i975X, but luckily the cold boot cutoff for that board was around -110, so the heat up phase would go by quickly. On X38 boards such as the Maximus, the best way that I know of to deal with this is to keep a blowtorch handy to rapidly heat the container up exactly when you need it. Hopefully it'll play nice under DI so you can get some easy subzero practice without running into big issues such as this. If push comes to shove, you can always substitute the acetone for denatured alcohol, which will keep it at about -50, at the expense of clock speeds of course, but the practice would be well worth it for starting in a situation like this.

Gautam said:

Matt, the temps are easier to control on LN2. The general procedure for running a board with a horrible cold boot such as this one is to boot into windows at around -20C with slower speeds and then setfsb/clockgen up once you're in Windows. Then you're set, provided that you can keep your system going without a crash. Say you're running at -125C though, and you accidentally forget to pour your CPU container at the right time during the 06 CPU test, and it heats up to -120, and your system crashes. Then you're stuck at -120, with the system crashed. it needs to be at -45 or higher to even POST. You can hold out on pouring the CPU container, sure, but its way the hell down there temperature-wise, and since your system is refusing to POST, you can't even load it up at all...so it'll just stay there. Very slowly climbing up. You could sit there for several minutes, during which your board could easily start frosting up and potentially die. This situation is where the true problem occurs. I had it happen to me all the time on LN2 on i975X, but luckily the cold boot cutoff for that board was around -110, so the heat up phase would go by quickly. On X38 boards such as the Maximus, the best way that I know of to deal with this is to keep a blowtorch handy to rapidly heat the container up exactly when you need it. Hopefully it'll play nice under DI so you can get some easy subzero practice without running into big issues such as this. If push comes to shove, you can always substitute the acetone for denatured alcohol, which will keep it at about -50, at the expense of clock speeds of course, but the practice would be well worth it for starting in a situation like this.

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G thanx for the advice and sharing of your experience...I'll be certain to keep this nugget of information handy for quick reference. I'm thinking that denatured alcohol and dry ice may be the easiest for me to begin with...

If your using DI you won't need to control the temps at all Matt, all these chips (I have heard of one or two that couldn't ) can run @ -70 no problem. It's when you start getting colder that you run into problems.