Overclocking

When it comes to overclocking results, we have very limited score results at this point, but as I work through the pile of boards I have here, a more detailed look at how each performs will be possible. I will also be reporting the voltage required on each board to hit our 4.6 GHz overclock with full stability, which does include passing a 12-hour test session with Prime95. I personally feel that all a user should need to adjust is CPU voltage, and perhaps IMC voltage based on what DIMMs are used, in order to easily reach a 24/7 stable overclock. I am also using a G.SKill 2400 MHz 8 GB kit for all overclock testing, and do expect that each board should have no issues with this kit, but time will tell, of course. If I run into any issues, you can be sure that I'll be reporting on them.


Overclocking with the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX, well, was pretty frustrating at first. If you just want to turn off turbo and straight multi-clock, there's nothing surprising, other than that the reported voltages don't actually reference anything in reality on the BIOS's monitoring panel, but the values offered for voltage adjustments do work correctly. The best I can advise is that if you get one of the boards, make sure to use a multimeter every step of the way, and don't rely on anything else. Memory clocking works well, with no issues hitting 2400 MHz with our G.Skill TridentX DIMMs. All of the sets of memory I have on-hand worked perfectly, in fact, which is a huge step for ECS in memory support. However, when it comes to going over 2400 MHz, some serious manual adjustments will be required, as the BIOS isn't quite as mature as some other OEMs offer, although similar results are possible given the right components. We reached our 4.6 GHz overclock with no adjustments to CPU voltage, and merely had to adjust vDIMM and IMC voltages to proper levels, 1.65 V and 1.05 V respectively. Under load the voltage supplied to the CPU measuring in at 1.189V, and the voltage adjusted according to power state without any issues, meaning that during idle periods, the voltage reduced to normal levels for our CPU @ 0.80 V.

Overclocked Performance Summary

Cinebench provided a substantial performance increase when over clocked, something that resounds true through the entire series of Intel-based products. The ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX is just behind the Gigabyte board, yet again.


Likewise, SuperPi 32m results proved the same as Cinebench, with substantial performance increases that are also noticed on previous Intel platforms. Yes, agian, it's just behind the Gigabyte board, which, of course, again ends up with slightly higher clocks.


WPrime 1024M numbers further the results, showing that there is true power available when overclocking the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX, again, just behind the Gigabyte board. ECS has never performed so well.


For a bit of 3D action we fired up CodeMaster's F1 2010 to find that the ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX showed a negative result, and try as I might, I couldn't figure out why, as the result just always was less than at stock. Since this title is quite sensitive to memory bandwidth, it could be just because stock timing options are the best optimized.


With Codemaster's F1 2010 starting to show its 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 Golden Board Z77H2-AX, being highly sensitive to single-threaded CPU performance. The final result increased by almost 33%, much higher than I had expected, and even beat out the Gigabyte board, too.