X-bit labs

Monday, June 26, 2006

Quad SLI on Intel P965 Chipset. If You Really Want It - You Can Do It

I believe our regular readers already know that SLI support can be enabled for Intel chipsets if you modify the Nvidia graphics card drivers accordingly. It is pretty hard to find modified versions of the latest drivers, so a lot of computer enthusiasts prefer to be happy with what they’ve got. Especially, since they may not have had even that if they followed all Nvidia’s recommendations :)

The guys from t-break web-site managed to get two GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics cards to work in Quad SLI mode in Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 mainboard:

Note that this mainboard is based on Intel P965 chipset so it doesn’t officially support SLI, although it has two graphics card slots. Looks like our colleagues from t-break used modified drivers. And looks like they have gone far ahead of the official driver release schedule, if they even managed to get Quad SLI mode working.

They used a Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz) processor on Conroe core with B0 stepping. This way one of the today’s most powerful processor cores was put into the same system with the fastest graphics cards of the year. If the drivers do not interfere, this system will set some very impressive records. Unfortunately, our colleagues didn’t reveal any benchmarks just yet and stated simply that “everything worked fine”.

Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 5.04GHz. New Overclocking Milestone for the Unannounced CPU

We have already posted a few reports about the extreme overclocking achievements of some guys from Sweden. They experimented with Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) pretty successfully and it was absolutely clear that the Scandinavian guys will not stop until they set the world record. In fact, they have already set a few “records”, but the biggest one would certainly be the highest CPU core clock.

As far as I understand, the absolute overclocking record and at the same time the Super PI / mod1.4 record still belongs to the Japanese enthusiasts, who managed to speed up their Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor to 5.013GHz. The Pi calculation with 1 million digits precision at this speed was completed within 10.140 seconds.

Note that the Swedish candidates for world record used Core 2 Extreme X6800 C1 stepping processor that demonstrates phenomenal overclocking potential even with air cooling. Why did they manage to go only as far as 4.95GHz?

It turns out that the BIOS of ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (i975X) mainboard didn’t allow raising the system bus frequency beyond 450MHz. The moment they got new BIOS that shifted this peak to 500MHz, the world record was set.

Nordic Hardware site reported that they hit the 5.04GHz frequency with liquid nitrogen cooling of down to -125C. They worked with Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) CPU with C1 core stepping.

The Vcore was raised to 1.73V, but as for the clock frequency multiplier, they couldn’t increase it because of the limitations in the mainboard BIOS. Therefore they overclocked the CPU by increasing the system bus frequency to 458MHz. The system completed the Super PI / mod1.5 XS test the results of PI calculation with up to 1 million digits precision in 10.234 seconds. Of course, this is not the world record yet, but they still got time.

I would like to say that this time the CPU worked in dual-core mode, while the Japanese overclockers disabled one of the cores to hit the 5.0GHz bar. The coldbug for this particular processor sat at -128C. No doubt that these results will get even better within the next days, because the mainboard and its BIOS remain the bottleneck preventing the frequency from going further up.