Foxconn Black Ops - Raw, Unadulterated Power
by Rajinder Gill on July 30, 2008 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Subzero Benchmarking Results
Now it's time for the fun part. It's not often we get a board in our hands that allows or even justifies dusting off the cascades. The Black Ops just begs for cold operation and the "Cold Boot" feature in the BIOS should certainly make our lives a lot easier. All of the X38/X48 boards we've had under the cascades so far have exhibited cold boot issues as early as -65C, while total shutdown occurs at around -95C on our processors.
Using the Black Ops with or without the Cold Boot function set to enabled, we managed a clean boot at -111C on the evaporator every time. This certainly saved us a lot of time and made tuning almost too easy. We decided to play it conservative on VTT and stuck to a setting of 1.35V (1.26V real) to 1.42V (1.36V real) throughout the course of testing with the QX9650.
We chose to use our older OCZ 1800 2x1GB kit for these runs, as the older Micron D9GTR parts are adept at running low latency at high bandwidth with high voltages. VDimm was kept in the region of 2.15V, with timings of 7-6-5-19 for most benchmarks at 450FSB.
First up was the challenge of seeing whether the Volterra 8-phase solution could handle a full quad-core load of wPrime 1024 at 1.81V on the processor.
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No problems at all: 5.4GHz and the board pretty much laughed at the load and asked for more. We found ourselves scoring a respectable 3 minutes and 23 seconds using virtually all memory defaults on an untweaked install of Vista 64.
Next up we have some 3D benchmarks using an ASUS 8800 GTS 512 using XP with SP2.
Aquamark3
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3DMark05
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Foxconn was kind enough to send us one of their brute force GTX 280 cards and told us to go wild with it. Even without voltage modification for the GPU, we managed a fairly impressive 905/1295 run of 3DMark06 at 5.4GHz without a glitch. Applying a voltage modification to the graphics card allowed us to scale the core speed to 937 while memory topped out at an impressive 1310 MHz. In all we managed a whopping 27K+ run with a single card, topping most current scores with this card.
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3DMark05 benchmarking followed with slightly reduced GPU clock speeds of 921/1310, providing us with a score of 33565 3DMarks.
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Finally, we managed to increase the CPU speed to 5.537GHz (4 cores active) and obtained a 322K run in Aquamark 3.
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We had planned to use an E8600 processor for further benchmarking but ran out of time for this review. The results certainly would have been interesting, as we have recently seen users benchmarking Intel's newest processor on the Black Ops at speeds of 6GHz. If we do the math, that's around 600FSB at 6GHz, so hardware permitting the possibilities of further benchmarking success is certainly apparent.
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yyrkoon - Monday, August 11, 2008 - link
You sir have obviously not heard of the term of "being slash-doted", but lets just say many hosts dread having links to their machines being on slash-dot because of the sheer volume of traffic that is caused on the host end.Either way, I never said anything about slash-dot so . . .
DrMrLordX - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Seriously:http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/25/...">http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/25/...
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
And in response,http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
read post 61.
regards
Raja
DrMrLordX - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
This matter isn't settled, but it is being argued by others in other forums where such things will be discussed in greater detail than they will here. Don't expect it to go away so easily.whatthehey - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
In order for it to go away, it just needs to be fixed. That shouldn't be too difficult. And then all the millions of Linux enthusiasts that run top-end $400 motherboards with heavy overclocking can rest easy.Wait! What's that you say? Most home Linux users are running hand-me-down $200 systems? Hmmm.... Can't imagine why they aren't a priority.
DrMrLordX - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
I put Xubuntu on my X2-3600+ system when it was brand new and pushed the chip to 3.2 ghz (stable) at one point. $200 hand-me-down? Nah.The fact that there are fully-suported flavors of Linux out there that can run on a cheap-as-in-free system from ten years ago is a plus, but it doesn't mean you have to run Linux on a system like that.
yyrkoon - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
I think you're a bit confused. Nothing like stereotyping whole groups for our own enjoyment though eh ?yyrkoon - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Those threads are bogus. There is NOTHING innocent regarding pointing 5 versions of Windows to the right tables, while having the Linux table point to an invalid region of memory, thus causing lock ups and instabilities.yyrkoon - Saturday, August 2, 2008 - link
FOXCONN has seen the error in their ways whether intentional or not. This is a boon for both FOXCONN, and linux users a like.http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=877721">http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=877721
Regardless of whatever OS/Hardware I choose, it is very good to know that a company such as FOXCONN is a company that listens to its customers(eventually).
MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Yeah, they screwed up. But seriously, follow the threads. The one on Ubuntu forums where it all seems to have started lead to someone from the company replying, saying someone screwed up and that they would be fixing it.The initial tech support guy's response was not what one would want to hear, but in the end it was just a lowly tech support guy.
Seriously, it was good to get steamed when it looked like they were deliberately screwing people over, but the need has passed. Keep some pressure on to make sure they actually follow through, but perpetual nerdrage isn't doing any good now that the issue is acknowledged and scheduled for a fix.