Product Listing

Wielding Foxconn's Flaming Blade (Intel X58)

By Vincent Chang - 11 Apr 2009

Overclocking & Test Setup

Overclocking

With the onboard power and reset buttons, status LED indicators, Force Reset button, clear CMOS switch and even a VFD connector that links to Foxconn's Quantum Force OC Panel (an optional module that gathers and displays crucial information like temperatures and voltages, including allowing users to change them on the fly), there are quite a few features here for the overclocking enthusiast.

Although most of these fall in the category of presenting information rather than directly overclocking the settings, they nonetheless play an important role in the process. The BIOS too has a decent variety of settings, which we have documented below:-

  • Base Clock (aka FSB) Settings: 66 to 500MHz
  • QPI Multiplier: Auto, x18, x22, x24
  • CPU Core Multiplier: 12 to 60
  • CPU Uncore Multiplier: Auto, x12 to x32 (in x2 steps)
  • CPU Voltage Settings: Up to +1260mV (in 10mV steps)
  • Memory Voltage Settings: 1.50 to 2.86V (0.01V steps)
  • IOH Core Voltage Settings: 1.10V to 2.36V (in 0.02V steps)
  • SB Voltage Settings: 1.40V to 1.80V (in 0.012V steps)

Similar to quite a few of our other tested X58 motherboards, the Flaming Blade hit the base clock wall at 220MHz during our attempt to overclock it. It's safe to say that most real overclocking scenarios will likely not use such a high base clock (especially on Extreme Edition processors), since they will prefer a lower base clock coupled with a much higher (than x12) multiplier for the overclock.

Test Setup

As with our Intel X58 motherboard reviews so far, the system configuration is listed below. Besides that, both Intel Turbo Boost and HyperThreading were enabled. We gathered a bundle of X58 boards that we had tested using this configuration previously and compared them to the Foxconn Flaming Blade.

  • Intel Core i7-965 XE (3.20GHz, Intel Turbo Boost, HyperThreading enabled)
  • 3 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0 (7-7-22 for Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB - with ForceWare 178.24 drivers
  • Intel INF 9.1.0.1007 and Intel Matrix Storage manager 8.6.0.1007 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

The following benchmarks were used to assess the performance of the motherboards:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 4)
  • Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • AquaMark3
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