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MSI X58 Pro-E Review
[Abstract]
Searching for a Mainstream Intel X58Not to sound like a broken record here but the high cost of Intel's high-end CPU microarchitecture, the Core i7, remains a considerable barrier to entry. Alm...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Overclocking
MSI's familiar Cell Menu in the X58 Pro-E BIOS contains all the tweaking options, from the voltages to the various clock frequency settings that's found on an Intel X58 motherboard. Some of the more relevant settings are listed below:
- Base Frequency (aka FSB) Settings: 100 to 400MHz
- PCIe Frequency: 100 to 200MHz
- DRAM Ratio: Auto, 3 to 8
- CPU Core Multiplier: 12 to 60
- Uncore Ratio: Auto, 10 to 24
- QPI Frequency: Auto, 4800, 5866, 6400MT/s
- CPU Voltage Settings: -320mV to +630mV (0.01 to 0.02V steps)
- Memory Voltage Settings: 1.20 to 2.77V (0.01V steps)
- NB Core Voltage Settings: 0.80 to 2.35V (0.01V steps)
- ICH Voltage Settings: 0.70 to 2.13V (0.01 to 0.05V steps)
Like most X58 motherboards we tested, 220MHz was about the highest we've pushed the base clock. |
As always, our overclocking attempt was based on getting the highest base clock for the motherboard and not necessarily the highest overall overclock. At 220MHz for the base clock, the MSI X58 Pro-E reached a similar maximum allowance as most of the X58 boards we had tested.
Test Setup
Both Intel Turbo Boost and HyperThreading were enabled during testing. As usual, we compared the MSI X58 Pro-E against a number of our previously tested results. The configuration below was used:
- 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 compared in the review:
BAPco SYSmark 2007 Preview (with Patch 4)
Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
SPECviewperf 9.0
AquaMark3
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