Asus M3A78-T and Phenom II X3 720BE
 

This motherboard has been on the pile of 'to-test' for quite some time now, but this week, I had the time (and the courage) to open the box and compare it to the Dfi Lanparty DK 790GX and Foxconn A7DA-S.



Since the normal test procedures are finished, I'm switching from my old 9950BE to the newer 720BE for some overclocking.

More to follow.

First problems already start to pop up: I'm unable to boot with a divider higher than 533MHz, whereas this was no issue with the 9950.

Something memory controller related? We'll keep you updated!

what happened to the fan clips :)

I just don't use them :p

Some updates on the divider problem.

At first, I thought it may have something to do with the onboard gpu, the HD3300, using the sideport memory. I tried again with a different external videocard, the 9500GT, but the 667MHz divider did not work either. So, it's not the IGP.

Secondly, I thought it may be a memory bank issue, so I switched memory to the two black slots. But again, the 667MHz divider did not work.

I also tried the 800MHz divider, but ... no succes :(

The problem seems to be memory-related. With the Crucials I'm able to work with divider 800 :)

what were you using before?

GSKill F2-8500CL5S-1GBPK x 2

That shouldn't happen, that GSKILL kit in ON the compatibility list

for this motherboard , time to fire off an email to asus and gskill :)

I may have made a little mistake :-)

Doh!

I just forgot to change the voltage to 2.1v. With 1.85v, the gkills don't boot because of a lack of voltage

they are rated at 2.1v then? :)

Yes: 2.0-2.1v

You'd expect this kind of high-end ddr2 memory to boot at 667MHz 1.85v, though.

Review is almost done; doing the last overclocking tests at the moment, which basicly consists of benching all the hwbot benchmarks for extra points for the team.

In contrary to the IGP on the Foxconn and Dfi motherboard, this one does actually overclock véry good. At the moment, I'm benching at 1000MHz core frequency!

and what performance are we looking at game-play wise at speed? some Crysis/Call of Duty benchies thrown in for fun? :)

I'll run a Crysis benchmark at stock and overclocked speeds :-).

Overclocking tips can be found in the article, by the way

1100MHz core seems to be stable ... just air cooling :eek:

800x600 0xAA 0xAF details @ high seems playable at FPS rates between 16-20FPS.

1680x1050 4xAA 0xAF details @ high is not playable :p

20 fps at high is quite good; but maybe at low-med settings you can run at 1024x768:)

for review, I'll use this:

800x600 high, no AA or AF
1024x768 medium, no AA or AF
1280x1024 low, no AA or AF

1280x1024 @ low: 30FPS :)

this OC or stock?:)

OC of course: 3.8G quadcore + 1.1G gpu

so other games like Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty 4/5 will run pretty good at 1280x1024 :)

Lol, I managed to hit n°1 spot in all rankings besides Vantage today after noticing two of my four records were alread broken yesterday, but not even 3h after I posted my new results, the 05 benchmark got beaten again.

Back to the bench table!

Just broke the 05 record again, checked hwbot and now my 01 is beaten.

AARRGHH, so much animo for this particular hw class :D

or people with lots of backup scores:)
Aquamark and 3DMark03 are yours for a while I think!

Yesterday, I had a few benchmarks scoring incredibly low for no apparent reason. When I checked the CPU-Z memory details, however, I saw that the memory was clocked at ~480MHz CL5, instead of the 640MHz I set in the bios. Apparently, it was not possible to run with the 1067 divider.

Today, I spent a few hours figuring out what was exactly causing this bizare issue. I went over the different timings, HT Link frequency settings, different combinations and finally ... I figured it out.

To get the 1067 divider working properly at high memory MHz overclocks, enable 2T mode. Even if you're certain the memory could run 1T, it seems to be a technical issue more than a memory bottlenecked issue. If you disable the 2T mode, the bios automaticly resets the memory to the 800MHz divider, even if you've manually put 1067MHz.

By the way, in the proces of figuring out this issue, I also figured out a golden setting for benchmarking :).

This new hardware tweak is great!

Just tried the setup for the last time and managed to do 76k, 28.4k, 8.9k, 7k. Now running 06 and Vantage for a last time :D.

//edit: added result links

http://hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=849598
http://hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=849605
http://hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=849603
http://hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=849602
http://hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=849601

all gold ! :D