Legit Motherboard Reviews
MSI Big Bang XPOWER Intel X58 Motherboard Review
| Manufacturer: | Micro-Star International |
| Product: | XPOWER |
| Date: | Thu, Jun 10, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Dan Stoltz - |
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Overclocking the MSI Big Bang XPower
Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get. Due to a small issue with my Intel Core I7 920, for today's overclocking we will be using a new Intel Core I7 930.
The Intel core I7 930 uses a 133 baseclock and a multiplier of 21 to achieve a default speed of 2.8GHz before the turbo kicks in. The first way that we decided to attempt to overclock the I7 930 was the OC Genie. It was a simple procedure: first, turn off the system, engage the OC Genie by depressing the button on the MSI Big Bang XPower and power on. Simple as that.
For a quick and easy way to overclock, this was rock solid. As you can see the multiplier was dropped from 21 to 18 and the Baseclock was raised from 133 up to 188MHz for a 584MHz boost.
The 3DMark Vantage results aren't as impressive as I would have hoped. Though I think we became GPU limited. We only saw an overall boost of 736 3DMarks, but there was a boost to the CPU score of nearly 1500 3DMarks -- pretty solid improvement for a simple touch of a button. Of course, we don't want to stop here. I decided to use the bios settings that the OC Genie supplied to see how far we could get on those. After raising the multiplier back to 21 one at a time we were still stable so I continued to raise the baseclock.
I was able to fire up Windows at an impressive 4.2GHz, although it wasn't stable. I had to raise the voltage up slightly from the OC Genie's 1.4V up to 1.431, and then we were stable.
The overall 3DMark Vantage results were still lacking in my opinion, but that's no fault of the MSI Big Bang XPower. We saw a 2000 point boost in the overall score, but only ~900 point improvement in the GPU score. The CPU Score is a whole different ballgame, though. We saw a nearly 7300 point boost in the CPU score!
Next Page - System Power Consumption
| Review Index |
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Page 1 - MSI Big Bang XPower Explodes Onto the Scene
Page 2 - MSI Big Bang XPower Box and Bundle Page 3 - MSI Big Bang XPower, A Closer Look Page 4 - MSI Big Bang XPower Bios Page 5 - Legit Reviews Test System Page 6 - PCMark Vantage Page 7 - 3DMark Vantage Page 8 - Super Pi Page 9 - Cinebench R11.5 Page 10 - SiSoftware Sandra 2010 Page 11 - x264 HD Video Encoding Page 12 - Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. Page 13 - Colin McRae: DiRT 2 Page 14 - Overclocking the MSI Big Bang XPower Page 15 - System Power Consumption Page 16 - Final Thoughts and Conclusion |
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