fps randy: Final Thoughts

First of all, I would like to thank all the Sponsors for donating prizes for this contest. ASUS gets a huge shout out for organizing the contest. The sponsors Would include: Antec, ASUS, Intel, G.Skills, Nvidia, Razer, and Samsung. I have used all your products in the past, and am still impressed with the quality and performance of them.

So, after having and using the completed build for the last few days, I have finally settled on a final overclock. 4.3Ghz seems to be acceptable for stability and temperatures. I would use the system at 4.4 or 4.5ghz, but the stability worries me for having using it over a long period of time.

My biggest regret for the project is not checking into the water block for the gpu. Air cooling is so yesterday in my books for a system described as "Xtreme". As a result I have not overclocked the gpu at all. However there really does not seem to be a huge need to, every video game I have played I have been able to crank the video settings as high as it can go with out once having huge frame rate drops, or running below 60 fps.

Now the motherboard I believe made a huge impact for the ability to overclock this system. The 48 phase power design seems to do what it is advertised to do. Keep stable power to ensure stable overclocks. The T. Probe feature seems like a god send. There is a T. Probe utility for windows which allows you to see the temperature for the 32 VRM's for the processor and watch how the heat fluctuates as the power changes on each VRM.

Some other great noteworthy features of the motherboard were the Power and Reset buttons that are on the board. These are not something one would use on a daily bases, but when you are beginning your build and testing some things, it is deffinently handy to have those two buttons around. Another cool button was the A-OK button which would try to find stable timings for your ram if you became overzealous playing with ram timings.

I have mixed feelings for the Turbo V Evo. It was awesome to be able to overclock your processor real time while in windows. The Auto Tuning feature I can see as being a great tool for people who are new to overclocking and do not want to spend time reading and testing. For more advance users who have some overclocking experience (intermediate and up) this was not a very useful feature, as it is possible to add a lot more base-clock than what the utility would do. The windows utility also seemed to be missing a lot of options that affect your overclock that you could only reach in the bios (this was probably why the auto tuning feature was not as good as manually overclocking).

Which brings me to talking about the Turbo V Remote. I see what the Turbo V Remote is suppose to do, but I was not able to use the remote for what I wanted to do. I wanted to have 3 over clocking profiles. A profile to use when I am surfing the net and not utilizing the entire cpu. Second profile would be my 4.3ghz Stable over clock. The last setting would be the 4.5ghz "questionably stable" profile which would be used for when I really need a few extra clock cycles (stock cpu speeds for example). The problem I had with the remote was that the difference between the first low power setting and the second 4.3ghz setting was such a change, that my system would immediately lock up. The handiest button was then the power button located on the remote that you could hold down and have your system shut down. The bus speed buttons worked as they seem they would (they adjusted the base clock speeds, and nothing else) but again large clock speed changes caused the system to lock up again. :(

The last feature of the board that I do not have much to say about is the EPU feature. This is a power saving feature. In my opinion it seemed kinda odd to have bundled with a motherboard that advertises as a board to overclock with. Generally I am not concerned with the amount of the power that my system uses if I am oveerclocking, because I already know it will be higher than most similar PC's. I also can not comment on how much it actually drops power usage of the system, as I did not have any tools that would measure how much the power supply was drawing. I really need to get something like: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/7657/

Since we are talking about power, lets talk about Antec's 850w Quattro PSU. This was a modular PSU, which allowed for removing clutter from the inside of your system. One of the things I though Antec could have improved on with the modular connectors was to make it so you could chose if you needed the 4pin or 8pin CPU power connector. I have also seen other manufactures split the connector so you could use it as either, much like 6pin and 8pin pci-e power connectors. Other than that, the fan inside the unit seems to be quiet as advertised, and according to hardware monitor the power seems to coming in within tolerances and they do not significantly change when I begin to work the system harder.

Other notable components in the system would be the ram from G.Skills. The ram is absolutely amazing. It has one of the highest speed ratings of 2133mhz. At one point I was over clocking and was able to run it near 2300mhz (changing base clock and memory dividers, changes the speed at which the ram will run). This allowed for a great deal of versatility when overclocking while keeping a high level of memory performance.

Next is Razer's contribution; The Lycosa keyboard and Death Adder mouse. I am a huge fan of Razer products. I was actually using the Lachesis mouse of theirs, and recently purchased the Carcharias headset as well as their Mantis Control mouse pad. The mouse is nice feeling in the hand like all their mice have been in the past.

This is however my first Razer keyboard. The first thing that sticks out is the backlit keys, the backlight can be turned on and off as desired on the key board. The WASD keys can lit on their own for gaming. The next thing is the USB and audio ports. These are for pluging your mouse and headset into. However I ended up plugging my mouse directly to the back of my computer. I liked having the usb port open for using other devices with(such as a usb memory stick, digital camera, ipod, etc...).

Now that I am done talking about the Sponsored prizes, some pictures of the final build.