Asrock Z77 Fatal1ty Performance Throttling

[agentsmith23]

I got a used Asrock Z77 Fatal1ty Performance motherboard the other day in hopes that I could get higher overclocks with it. It hits 5GHz now with much less voltage than my Gigabyte Z68XP-UD4 but after a while it throttles down to 3.3GHz I have disabled all of the C states in the BIOS and made sure that throttling is disabled. What else should I be checking? I can't find any other settings in the BIOS that would be causing this.

 

[agentsmith23]

Here is a screenshot. Here I was running Prime95 to stress test and running Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, HW Monitor and CPU-Z to keep an eye on things. You can see that the frequency keeps going up and down. WIth it at 5GHz it just went to 3.3 and stayed there.

 

[Boulard83]

VRM overheating ? you have any fan blowing at VRM's ?

 

[agentsmith23]

No I don't but I just touched the heatsink covering them and wow is it hot. I put a thermocouple probe on the heatsink and it is reading 60C/140F. I don't have a way to permanently mount a fan blowing at them, should I remove the heatsink and redo the thermalpaste?

 

[Boulard83]

No, these usually use thermal pads and using paste may not provid good contact depanding on the way its mounted, could end up not touching the heatsink if the monting height is fixed and calculated with the termal pad thickness.

If you read ~60°c with a probe on top of the heatsink, the transistor under it may be at much higher temp. And this can cause throtling.

Try with a fan blowing at it temporary just to see if it still throtle.

 

[agentsmith23]

So far that seems to be working. The probes temp has dropped 8 degrees Celsius and still dropping and no more throttling. Any suggestions for a permanent fix?

 

[Boulard83]

Any suggestions for a permanent fix?

Permanant fan ? Other than that .... you can't cool something in a magical way.

What is your CPU cooling ?

 

[agentsmith23]

It is in my sig. Swiftech H2O-220 Elite cooling CPU only

 

[Boulard83]

Sry, didnt looked your sig. This is a common "problem" with CPU watercooling, you end up with zero air flow at the VRM's and other component all around the CPU socket.

Even my tower heatsink is'nt that good at this since the airflow is parallel to the MB, i added a 120mm fan right next to my VRM's. I'm on a testbed so its really EZ for me to work my "airflow".

Find waterbloc for your motherboard or work something to cool the VRM's, direct some airflow toward them.

 

[manu2b]

I owned a couple of Fatalities (Z68 pro and z77 pro-m)

On both of them, I had a 120 fan blowing on the verms heatsink.

 

[wingman99]

What boards do you not have to cool the VRM?

 

[Boulard83]

What boards do you not have to cool the VRM?

None ? ...

If you dont OC, VRM's should be fine. When OCing, not only the CPU become hotter.

On my HTPC i use a downdraft CPU cooler so the CPU cooling act as VRM's and memory cooler too. Downdraft CPU cooling is a good way to have airflow on the entire CPU socket area.

On my mainrig its a dual tower cooler, added a 120mm fan for the VRM's and some accidental airflow to the memory too.

 

[agentsmith23]

VRM overheating ? you have any fan blowing at VRM's ?

Thanks a lot for the quick reply and being spot on with the issue. Just looking for a waterblock for the VRM now.

 

[Boulard83]

NP

 

[agentsmith23]

I have been reading about other Asrock Z77 motherboards and noticed that the Z77 Extreme4 has a lot of complaints of the same issue and it is becuase of the D-Pak mosfets, if I remove one of the heatsinks how can I tell if the mosfets are D-Pak or not?

 

[wingman99]

D-Pak mosfets,they look like this.


Could you provide a link for the problems with the ASRock extreme 4?

 

[EarthDog]

What boards do you not have to cool the VRM?

z77? Never cooled mine through 5ghz...no board I reviewed or owned needed it. They are all under water too on an open test bench with no fans. Heatsink were barely warm to the touch.

Now x79 was a requirement it seemed however.

That said, the ex4 isn't made with as good of parts as the ex6. I wouldn't take an ex4 much past 4.5ghz personally.

 

[agentsmith23]

Could you provide a link for the problems with the ASRock extreme 4?

It isn't exactly a problem but due to using the D-Pak mosfets they just can't overclock very well with higher voltages because once you hit a certain voltage the mosfets will over heat and throttle the CPU.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1271002/asrock-z77-vrm-phase-cooling-badly-needed

http://www.overclock.net/t/1333812/asrock-z77-extreme4-z77-extreme6-review

 

[manu2b]

Never had any issue with Asrock boards.

One of my 2600k was [email protected]/1.65v (and didn't die BTW!) with the Z68 Fatality, and the other one was running stable@5GHz/1.47v 5.1GHz/1.5v for months with the z77 fatality pro-m.

 

[agentsmith23]

Never had any issue with Asrock boards.

One of my 2600k was [email protected]/1.65v (and didn't die BTW!) with the Z68 Fatality, and the other one was running stable@5GHz/1.47v 5.1GHz/1.5v for months with the z77 fatality pro-m.

It's not all of their boards just the mosfets on the Z77 E4 use older mosfets that don't handle higher volts well.