Overclocking

Overclocking with the ECS X79R-AX was very easy indeed, with the board matching the best average maximum clocks we've ever been able to reach with our particular CPU sample. Our maximum memory clocks were quite good as well, considering that the XMP v1.3 profile was not supported, and defaulted to 1866 MHz instead of the 2133 MHz that our G.Skill kit is rated for. With this in mind, the best results, clearly, will come from memory kits listed on the QVL for the ECS X79R-AX that can be found on the board's product page on the ECS website. It's also worth noting that CPU temperatures really held us back from getting higher clocks, and that has nothing to do with the ECS X79R-AX, that really seemed to want to go further, but thermal throttling under stress testing prevented us from doing so. That said, we did manage to get our G.Skill ram running at 2133 MHz, and we reached the top clock of 4.4 GHz before hitting the thermal throttle point that was a result of our cooling.

Overclocked Performance Summary

Cinebench provided a substantial performance increase when over clocked, but was a bit shy of the super-optimal 30% increase that would match our 33% increase in speed, from 3.3 GHz, to 4.4 GHz.


Likewise, SuperPi 32m results proved the same as Cinebench, with a substantial performance increase.


WPrime 1024M numbers further the results, showing that there is true power available when overclocking the ECS X79R-AX.


For a bit of 3D action we fired up CodeMaster's F1 2010 to be impressed with the performance boost offered compared to the other products. This does highlight that finally, with the Intel X79 platform offering quad-channel memory support, we are already at near optimal performance in this application, even at stock, while with P67 and Z68 products, we managed to notice quite significant gains in 3D performance that is just not noticed here.


With Codemaster's F1 2010 starting to show it's age, and proving less reliable in showing performance increases, we've added the Shogun 2 DirectX 9 CPU benchmark to our testing suite. In the months to come, it will get added to the main testing section, but for now, it does show a very large increase in performance when run on the overclocked ECS X79R-AX, being highly sensitive to single-threaded CPU performance.