[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
Budget motherboards are often designed to run at stock speeds and not an awful lot more. Where the ECS Z87H3-A3X is concerned, it does come with a better equipped power delivery for the CPU but there are many other factors that overclocking relies on too such as the BIOS for example. As you would’ve in the BIOS section, it is relatively full of features, but whether they will be used properly and/or have any use for overclocking is anyone’s guess so my guess is that I should put it to the test. Yeah, let’s do that.
Before we even start, I have run into a problem. I’ve disabled C1E, the only Intel power saving technology that I have control over. Unfortunately, as I was unable to turn off all of the power saving features, and although I thought I had done so, I had a tough time even getting the processor to run at 3.9GHz (it’s maximum turbo frequency.) Even though I had set the “CPU Multiplier” to 39 in the BIOS, it would not hold the processor at 3900MHz. That multiplier actually translates to the dynamic frequency which it boosts up to under load and it isn’t a constant or forced multiplier. It soon settles back to 3500MHz which will undoubtedly affect some benchmarks but it should be okay in most, if not all gaming scenarios.
Another gripe of mine, as an overclocker, is the inability to set voltages other than with offset voltages. Don’t take that the wrong way, I know how to use them correctly and how to put them to good effect, but when you can’t see what voltage you’re setting and especially as the “CPU Voltage” only reads the input voltage (VRIN) of the chip, it’s no good to me. It becomes guesswork unless you know the stock value of your processor which happens to be 1.056 volts on my chip, and most other i7-4770Ks on this planet. I do like to manually insert the voltage so that I know how much the CPU is getting without needing a calculator to hand to get an exact voltage and allowing for some vDroop in instances where you cannot control it. This is easily fixed with a BIOS update though so I won’t bang on about it for too long.
So anyway, as I am trying to get my CPU to function at the 3.9GHz required which has been no issue in a few other motherboards that I’ve played around with, I proceeded to test and just had to run with what it gave me. Surprisingly, the motherboard came out on top in a lot of benchmarks, besting some motherboards worth two or three times its value! I do not have an explanation for that though. It could be down to a number of things such as smaller tracks, length wise, due to the PCB size or some better optimised things in the BIOS such as the secondary and tertiary DRAM timings for example. It definitely isn’t being sneaky like an MSI FM1 motherboard that slowed down the RTC (Real Time Clock) to make it appear like it was doing things faster than it really was. Let’s examine what happens at 4.5GHz, as that’s probably the more important number here anyway.
Right, okay, so, now we’re at at 4.5GHz. Whilst the CPU would appear to be running at 4500MHz according to CPUZ, in real world terms, it was more likely that it was fluctuating constantly. The power draw tests, which I did complete but are no in this review for exactly the reason I am about to give you say differently. At 4.5GHz, it is drawing 70 – 80 watts less power than any other motherboard that we’ve tested. That’s simply not possible and the benchmarks reflect my findings too. The scores are sometimes lower than what they were at “stock” speeds which proves only one thing – it isn’t running anywhere near 4.5GHz. This is most likely due to the dynamic frequency kicking it up and then seeing that there was no load for ‘x’ amount of seconds as it is doing something on the GPU side, dropping down its frequency and then taking its time to pick back up when the CPU is required again. If the CPU isn’t being used to its full potential and the board decides to drop the frequency as it is, in its mind, entering the power saving state, the CPU is still required to feed the GPU, even if it is an iGPU (the HD4600) such as in our testing.
One final point I wish to make is that the board struggles to get itself out of a failed overclock boot loop. You need to remove both the power from the board and the CMOS battery to reset it in order to be able to try again. Of course, you then lose your settings which you were playing around with and have to start again. It’s certainly not for the inexperienced, that’s for sure. This is no big deal, it’s more of an inconvenience than anything else.
Due to what was said in the above, I cannot safely say that this motherboard is built for anything other than stock speeds. Suddenly your FPS plummets, and you find out your CPU decided to throw in the towel, say “nope, workload is not for me” and slow down your system. It would annoy you tremendously, wouldn’t it? Prior to a BIOS update which ECS provided me with, which is available from the ECS website, the system would actually downclock into its lowest possible power state, and sit at 800MHz. Thankfully, I’ve not seen this happen after a BIOS update so we are heading in the right direction and with a few more tweaks, this motherboard should be able to maintain its ratio with no problems.
On a slightly brighter note… I am working closely with ECS to try to ensure that their next generation of motherboards that’re coming out on the Intel Z97 platform will have these problems addressed and they should hopefully make some great boards.
