Foxconn Black Ops - Raw, Unadulterated Power

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.

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

3DMark05

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.

3DMark05 benchmarking followed with slightly reduced GPU clock speeds of 921/1310, providing us with a score of 33565 3DMarks.

Finally, we managed to increase the CPU speed to 5.537GHz (4 cores active) and obtained a 322K run in Aquamark 3.

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.