Anubis_386's XFX 790i Review & Q9450 Overclocking Adventure

So, my Asus Maximus Formula is basically now senile thanks to a power cut during a BIOS update .. Thus I’ve bought a XFX 790i Ultra motherboard and 4GB (4x1GB) of OCZ 1333Mhz 7-7-7-20 DDR3 RAM, I’ve also got an Q9450 on the way ..

Q9450 is inbound .. Should have it Tuesday but am off to Iceland the next day so OCing will have to wait till the following week

Q9450 was DOA but I've got an X3350 on the way, It's taking an age to get here tho ..

Presenting Anubis_386’s XFX 790i Ultra Review and Q9450 X3350 Overclocking adventure - Enjoy! ​

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I got my board from ebuyer.com for £230 and the first thing I noticed when the package arrived at my door was the weight of the box .. It wasn’t until I saw the board’s all-in-one heatpipe cooling system that I realised why the box was so heavy.

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I think the above pic makes it obvisous that XFX and nVidia are marketing this board towards the ‘Extreme’ Gamer - I do think the “Gaming – Do Not Disturb” door sign is a nice touch though. Here’s a board shot...

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Very nVidia, green and black – looks pretty cool though. You can see the size of the board’s cooling now; the heatsinks surrounding the CPU socket are linked by a heatpipe to a slightly larger heatsink over the MCP (nVidia’s term for the North Bridge if any of you didn’t know). This is where the stock cooling fan is mounted; there is then a quite thick strip of metal connecting the SPP (South Bridge) to the MCP’s heatsink. I find this quite odd that they didn’t decide to use a heatpipe which would be more efficient.

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Here’s two close ups of the area around the CPU socket, as you can see there isn’t a hell of a lot of room thanks to the board’s cooling. I’m anticipating having some trouble mounting my Ultra 120 Extreme.

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The 790i’s three 16x PCI-Express slots; the top and bottom slots are PCI-E 2.0, the middle one how ever isn’t. This won’t really make any difference to performance however because the bandwidth of a PCI-E 1.0 slot isn’t used fully anyway. The board has two PCI slots and two PCI-E 1x slots also. Notice the red SATA port too – I have no idea why that’s there really .. Any idea’s anyone?

Continued from Post 1 ...

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This picture shows the arrangement of the boards six SATA ports, the boards only IDE connector, LED poster and you can just see the front panel and USB connectors on the far left. Something I would like to see with this board is an LED poster screen like those that come with the newest Asus boards, they are small external screens and tell you actual information not just a code you have to then look up.

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Those are the boards SATA 1 & 2 ports, I like where there positioned as it will make cable management much easier and the cables won’t interfere with any long graphics cards.

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And finally.. The board’s back panel – plenty of USB connectors, 7.1 sound, 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports and an E-SATA connector. I don’t use E-SATA but it’s a nice addition.

Overall, the board’s layout seems very good; the majority of the connectors are in places which won’t interfere with other components. My main concerns at the moment are about mounting my CPU cooler; people with large coolers are really going to have some trouble I think.

Now I just need to wait for the rest of my RAM and for my new Q9450 ..Cheers for looking and stay tuned folks

CPU & RAM Pics + BIOS Review

Here's a teaser shot ... DDR3 1333Mhz 7-7-7-20


[Added 23/4/08]

Now that everything has arrived I can take you throught the 790i's BIOS .. And a very nice BIOS it is .. Everything is layed out in a very familiar fashion with all the settings grouped together quite logically. Its a very easy BIOS to get to grips with and provides us "enthusiasts" with a fair few tools for clocking up our chips. It could be better, the number of voltage options and memory sub timings you can change aren't as good as some other boards, my last board was an Asus Maximus Formula and that allowed quite a bit more tweaking then this 790i does.


This page shows one of the flaws, although a minor one, of this boards BIOS .. You might be able to Unlink your Memory and FSB but if you want to leave them linked (for the slight bandwidth increase it offers) then your choice of FSB/RAM raitio's is quite small.


Not as meny sub timings as I would have liked ..


CPU Core = 0.51250v ~ 2.00000v in 0.00625v increments
CPU FSB = 1.10v ~ 1.45v in 0.05v increments
Memory = 1.500v ~ 2.275v in 0.025v increments
nForce SPP = 1.30v ~ 1.55v in 0.05v increments
nForce MCP = 1.500v ~ 1.750v in 0.050v increments
GTL Ref = -155mv ~ +155mv in 5mv increments


vDroop with my board seems quite minimal which is good ..

Reserved for Overclocking

Overclocking ​

3DMark 06 @ 3.6GHz = 18224 3DMarks
SuperPi 1M @ 3.6GHz = 13.725 sec

The SuperPi time still isn't great .. It will improve tho when I get around to clocking up the RAM .. The 3DMark 06 score beats that of my E8400 @ 4GHz so I'm pretty happy as this will be my 24/7 clock speed .. Next comes finding a 24/7 RAM overclock, then a hefty stress test ..

Sunday is bench day (just air I'm afraid, too strapped for LN2 at the mo) .. Stay tuned!

congrats on the new toy...layout of the components is similar to the 680i (aside form the socket area/NB)...but your assessmet of the cpu sockey area is spot on..folks with large coolers or cpu pots (ln2/dry ice/vapo) are going to have problems (or at least challenges) with mounting. i'm looking forward to some bench results, particluarly 3D03 and 3D06 if you can mange once you get a complte rig...

Indeed, the layout is almost identical to the 680i .. The main changes are the MCP and DDR3 instead of DDR2 ..

When the stock cooling is off there's a fair bit of room so insultating the area around the CPU socket won't really be a problem but then attaching anything large will be ..

nVidia (well there reference board manufacturers) should really change to all solid capacitors like most other board companies. The addition of 2-Phase power systems for the RAM and MCP would be have been much better also.

I'll do SuperPi, 3D03 and 3D06 runs before, during and after overclocking .. All with my HD3870X2 (that's the next thing to upgrade, I've got my sights set on a 9800GX2)

Anubis_386 said:

Indeed, the layout is almost identical to the 680i .. The main changes are the MCP and DDR3 instead of DDR2 ..

When the stock cooling is off there's a fair bit of room so insultating the area around the CPU socket won't really be a problem but then attaching anything large will be ..

nVidia (well there reference board manufacturers) should really change to all solid capacitors like most other board companies. The addition of 2-Phase power systems for the RAM and MCP would be have been much better also.

I'll do SuperPi, 3D03 and 3D06 runs before, during and after overclocking .. All with my HD3870X2 (that's the next thing to upgrade, I've got my sights set on a 9800GX2)

Click to expand...

Have you seen what Kingppin did with his?

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=180875

I did .. but he has a fair few advantages .. He's sponsored by nVidia and Evga, he knows a hell of a lot more about PCs then I ever could, and he has access to LN2 .. I might be able to borrow a friend's pot and get some DIce on the CPU but that's unlikely, air is it for me

I just hope this board can give me 500FSB for my Quad .. The downside of the Q9450 is a 8x multi ..

Just removed the stock cooling to replace TIM .. The board now has Tim Consultants TC-0098 on the MCP & SPP .. That should bring the temps down a good bit

Here's a chipset shot .. (it looks blue because of the reflection from my monitor)

Will be watching this closely as it will determine whether I step up to the evga 790i or not. Do you have access to another Wolfdale to see how the board is doing, I'm also interested to see what that particular DDR3 is capable off.

Subscribed

Yup, subscribed to this bad boy -- wanna see how it fares with the evilness that is quad penryn

Wish I could afford that board I'm liking the start of this review too

I'm most curious to see if the OCZ ram will even work in that board, my 2GB @1600 sticks are not working in the Asus 790i.

Bit of an update .. Q9450 was DOA .. But I've got an X3350 that should be here within a few days ..

Starting to get really frustrated with the ASUS 790I and 4GB OCZ1600 EB of RAM.

Where do I start...the system will never boot(BSOD at loadup) with auto settings and both sticks of 2GB RAM installed.

If I adjust the timings(as per Anand review) and increase voltage it will boot into Vista 64...it will pass Memtest86 everything is honky dory until I power off...next startup I get BSOD again...screw with a few settings then back to the working settings and she loads again, is there some other cause of the BSOD?

I have none of the problems with 1 stick of RAM..only when I want 2 sticks for 4GB total.

I'm on the latest 6010 beta BIOS for the SIIE.

The P03 BIOS (6010 is the Asus version of it I believe) has problems with saving RAM voltage and timing settings, each time your reboot you will need to check that they are set as they should be .. It shouldn't take long for Asus to bring their new BIOS out which should fix this + provide a bit more stability ..

What sort of overclock have you gotten with your X3350 by the way? This thread could do with some 790i results as I'm still waiting on my chip

Anubis_386 said:

The P03 BIOS (6010 is the Asus version of it I believe) has problems with saving RAM voltage and timing settings, each time your reboot you will need to check that they are set as they should be .. It shouldn't take long for Asus to bring their new BIOS out which should fix this + provide a bit more stability ..

What sort of overclock have you gotten with your X3350 by the way? This thread could do with some 790i results as I'm still waiting on my chip

Click to expand...

Overclock LOL I can't get the friggen machine stable at stock with 4GB...although I just read a thread on xtremesystems where the guy says BSOD and unstable when set @1333 but if he goes to 1800 exact same settings he's stable...go figure!!. Going to try that when I get home, didn't want to overclock until Nvidia figured out the corruption issues..I am using RAID 5 for the OS which is even more dangerous for corruption they say. Screw it I'm think now as I can't even get SP1 to load on the current Vista 64 install(fails everytime)...might aswell try and blow it up because I think I have to reinstall at this point.

On a side note, anyone able to sleep a 790i MB?..I'm crashing on sleep with 2 or 4 gb of ram.

This morning my nice n shiny X3350 arrived (finally!) .. This is the Xeon branded version of the Q9450 and it’s identical to it in every way however Xeon’s, being server chips, are possibly higher binned versions so hopefully will run at lower voltages and clock better.

Xeon X3350 (45nm) – 2.66GHz, 12MB L2 – 1333MHz FSB
S-Spec: SLAX2
Batch #: L806A744
Pack Date: 04/03/08
VID: 1.0625v

However, it seems the temperature sensors on my chip are completely buggered (well in Vista definately) as i’m seeing 50°C across all 4 cores with CoreTemp, with RealTemp tho all 4 cores are around 40°C. My BIOS reads core0 at around 34°C ... My U120-Ex is cold to the touch even at the base and the air coming from my fans is at my ambient temps (I’m running 2x Ultra Kaze 120x38mm fans @ 9v).

Here are a few Stock speed benchmarks .. Just look at the amount of bandwidth DDR3 gives .. SuperPi 1M time isn’t all that great tho ..


BIOS review has been updated and Overclocking is too come ..

Excellent, would love to see what that 790i can do, give it some gas man

Overclocking post updated! (#4)

Sunday is bench day .. Just air tho .. Will go for max CPU/RAM/GPU clock and post up timings/scores and see what FSB this board can do with a quad ..