[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
It is no secret that the MSI X99A XPOWER motherboard is designed with overclockers in mind, MSI leave practically nothing to chance when equipping their boards for sub-zero torture and these boards are well designed to handle the job! Of course I would love to have put this board on LN2 to show more function; maybe another day though?
Of course I will be testing with the available gear to hand on our test bench which means our Intel Core i7 5960x will be cooled with our Corsair H80i running push/pull. Knowing from previous boards that 4.5GHz under these cooling conditions is possible, I jumped straight in for the kill and although I don’t usually do this, I knew this board was going to back me up all the way; I was right and 4.5GHz was easily achievable with 1.4v. Sounds a little high but the silicone gods weren’t so forthcoming when I obtained the CPU and 4.5GHz is usually my limit on air/water.
Not to be deterred from going higher, I set about pushing the OC socket which this board is equipped with; the OC socket essentially adds extra pins which allows higher cache clock speeds (a new variable in overclocking and performance) and higher memory overclocks. Of course the memory on the test bench isn’t flexible and this board supports 3333MHz DDR4 overclocked so pushing the limit was always going to be hard, but 4.6GHz was easily achievable too.
That being said 4.6GHz was stable under Cinebench 11.5 and R15, but for a full stress test, it would eventually topple over, but this is the highest I have had this particular CPU on any given X99 so far; even the ASUS Rampage Extreme X99 board wouldn’t do this speed. Is this a testament to MSI’s OC DNA? I think so, but the real potential is unlocked when used with “colder” cooling methods!
MSI have included a few tools for the job in the way of their MSI Command Centre and for those wanting a programme running with slightly less resources, MSI Command Centre Lite! In addition to the on-board OC Essentials kit, buttons and switches, the software allows you to control and further enhance overclocking potential for those wanting to tweak inside the operating system without the need to resetting to the BIOS; I have found this software handy in a competition environment so it’s a huge thumbs up for MSI here!
A great review Gav. And for lazy guys like me the first and the last pages were the best.
Thank you very much Arif!