Overclocking Peculiarities

Strange as it might seem, but we experienced much fewer problems during CPU overclocking on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard, although everything began with a very frustrating disappointment.

“Overclock Mode” parameter in the mainboard BISO is set to Auto by default. It can be changed to Optimized, but in this mode the board wouldn’t boot, as we have already explained above. You can also set “I.O.T.” (Intelligent Overclocking Technology) and the board will automatically overclock the system by the specified percentage under increasing workload. In order to get access to the base frequency adjustment option, you have to set this parameter to Manual. We did exactly that, but the frequency wouldn’t increase and the CPU wouldn’t overclock. After playing with a few other setting I loaded Windows. You can imagine how surprised I was to find out that the processor core voltage was increased to 1.4V! Of course, its affected the processor power-saving technologies: the multiplier lowered but the voltages remained increased in idle mode.

I used to be very unhappy about Asus mainboards with very “smart” BIOS that wouldn’t let us overclock processors and keep the power-saving technologies working at the same time. Once the FSB frequency increased past a certain level, the BIOS decided that it was time to increase the CPU Vcore and from that moment on all Intel’s efforts in lowering the heat dissipation of their processors and improving their performance-per-watt came crashing down. By the way, soon we will be able to check out the performance and overclocking on a few new Asus mainboards. But things are actually not so good at all on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. You don’t even need to overclock anything: just tell the board about your intentions by setting the “Overclock Mode” to Manual and the board will bump up the processor Vcore just like that. Of course, you can protect yourself against too dramatic voltage increase by setting CPU Vcore at a certain fixed value, but it will not bring processor power-saving technologies back to life.

Sad. I sincerely hope that it is just a bug and not intentional take on overclocking as means of increasing the performance at any price. This approach also has its right to exist, processor power-saving technologies will be of no use to those who have their systems running under 100% load 24/7. You can also ignore power-saving if you don’t really care about long-term stability of the overclocked system, but aim only at a record-breaking number or screenshot. However, there are not too many users like that out there, and the majority needs their system to be quiet and economical in idle mode and ultimately fast under heavy load. However, the current implementation of the “EZ Overclocking” function makes us believe that ASRock took into account only the interests of the first user group and completely left out the second. I have to remind you that when you decide to overclock the processor to a certain frequency in the “EZ Overclocking” section, it immediately disables all processor power-saving technologies and Turbo Boost, locks the multiplier and increases the voltages excessively.

So, the economical CPU overclocking mode when the frequency increases, but all processor power-saving technologies keep working is impossible on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. And the only reason is because the board immediately increases the voltage as soon as you set “Overclock Mode” to Manual. It is a real pity because Gigabyte mainboards - against which we are comparing ASRock’s solution today – allow pushing the CPU frequency up to impressive 3.8GHz with the help of this “smart” overclocking alone. However, overclocking results on our ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard would have been lower anyway. Gigabyte mainboards had a special “Load-Line Calibration” option that prevented the CPU Vcore from dropping under heavy load thus ensuring that the processor core voltage would remain at its nominal value and that the CPU would remain stable during overclocking. There is no option like that in the BIOS of ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard.

Well, we will have to consider overclocking as means of increasing the performance at any price, disregarding the power consumption, heat dissipation and noise. But first let’s find out the maximum base frequency at which ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard remains stable with the multiplier lowered to its minimal value of x12.

215MHz is an excellent result! Of course, the CPU is not overclocked in this case, its frequency is even a little lower than the nominal. But most importantly, the board allows it to work at this high base frequency without losing stability. This margin is more than enough to successfully overclock our CPU sample to its absolute maximum. Theoretically. During our practical experiments we could get our system to run stably only at 3.7GHz.

This is a pretty low result, considering that Gigabyte mainboards can overclock the same exact CPU to 3.95GHz with increased Vcore. However, we can improve it a little bit with the help of the Turbo Boost technology working “correctly” on ASRock X58 SuperComputer board. The board failed the stability test with the CPU overclocked to 3.8GHz. However, at that point it loaded the CPU to its maximum with 8 threads in Prime95 utility. If the test application created no more than four threads, the system passed all tests at 3.8GHz frequency.

However, there is a drawback as well in using Turbo Boost technology for CPU overclocking on ASRock X58 SuperComputer. When the utility loads the CPU with five threads or more, the processor clock frequency drops to 3.62GHGz.

As a result, the user can select the most optimal CPU overclocking mode for his needs. If the system is mostly used by well paralleled applications, such as video or sound processing, or distributed computing, then it is most effective to overclock the CPU to 3.7GHz and have Turbo Boost disabled. If there are no multi-threaded applications involved, , it will make more sense to keep this technology up and running and overclock the CPU to 3.8/3.62GHz depending on the load.

However, there is one more option available. You can disable SMT technology that allows each CPU core to process two computational threads at a time. In this case multi-threaded performance drops dramatically, because the CPU can only process four computational threads at a time instead of eight. However, you will be able to increase the resulting clock speed to 3.9GHz, which will definitely pay back in most contemporary applications that would normally create two computational threads at the most.

However, ASRock X58 SuperComputer still falls behind Gigabyte here, because in these conditions we managed to overclock our processor on Gigabyte mainboards to 4.1GHz. Besides, you can get the memory to work at high frequencies on Gigabyte mainboards, which on ASRock X58 SuperComputer you have to use aggressively low timings to make up for the low memory frequency. The results of this comparison are quite logical and they are not in ASRock’s favor. However, I am still very positive about the mere possibility of CPU overclocking on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard, even despite a few issues in the implementation of this procedure.