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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ImmortalZ - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
You do realize these people are given QX9770s, GTX280s and assorted hardware for free, every generation?Do you know most of these people end up working for the very manufacturer's products they torture test?
Do you know that you're a moron?
strikeback03 - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Personally, I'd rather grow a mullet, buy a Mustang, and head for the local drag strip.Berger - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
'Digital Freak' what a freaking handle.No need to be discriminative you narrow minded moron.
Nyarlathotep - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
I used to really like linux but the more posts I´ve read by linux users, the more I hate it. Linux nerds probably get paid by Microsoft for ruining linux chances. They are everywhere whining and crying. For every decent linux user there seem to be 5 obnoxious nerds.Yesterday I uninstalled Ubuntu from my laptop because it made me feel like if I supported obnoxious linux nerds. If it wasn´t for them linux would probably be the most popular OS right now, not windows.
TA152H - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
One thing I have been saying for 25 years, and has been validated by the years is that Unix will never be a popular operating system. Linux often mentioned by people that don't really use it that much, they want to whine about Microsoft and such, or at a higher level, whine about the establishment in general. Don't get me wrong, I despise Microsoft too, but I'm not so pathetic as to act like Unix is the answer. It's a horrible operating system that's a pain in the backside to work with. They can sugar coat that dung all they want, but it will always smell and will only be a niche product. GUIs help some by insulated the user from the miserable underpinnings, but, really, anyone that likes the word "grep", and thinks upper and lower case parameters should have different meanings, is generally going to be a maladjusted dickhead.I still think OS/2 was better than Windows, but it's very much a niche product now (in its new incarnation as Ecomstation) and is used about as often as rotary telephones. I whined for a while about Windows too, but mainly because all my work experience had been with OS/2, and I didn't want to be jobless :-P.
No one really listens to the whining dorks that cry to the sky about foul play. Linux isn't popular because, basically, it sucks like all Unix varieties do. They'll exist in niches, but you can't expect the mainstream market to embrace it. Apple did a good job of hiding the difficulty of the underlying operating system, but it's still a niche product as well. Even if there were a good operating system it would be extremely difficult to break the software monopoly of Microsoft, so saying a Unix variety would be the dominant operating system were it not for some oft-ignored dweebs, is as silly as the whiners are.
We've already gone from MVS, to DOS, to Windows NT as the dominating operating systems during the lifetime of Unix. It's always been a niche product. Outside of the Microsoft haters, do many people really want it to be anything more than that? It's a pity IBM still won't make OS/2 open source. It would at least have a chance as an open source competitor. Unix? Never. But, as has been the case for 30 years, you'll still hear them saying it's just about to take off. It never changes, and kind of gives one a sense of security in a world that changes too fast. Unix will take over soon! Just wait! It's even money if it will happen before the Sun eats the Earth.
swaaye - Friday, August 1, 2008 - link
:)yyrkoon - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
Look. You should be using your OS of choice for YOU, not anyone else.The whole idea is HAVING the ability to make that choice.
I use Windows on my main machines here at home, but I like the option of being able to use which over OS I please on them, and yes, I have a couple of Linux boxen too, as well as an openSolaris machine. Hell, I would not be adverse to putting OSX on my own hardware, IF Steve Jobs and Apple will ever pull its head out of their backsides . . . In a general purpose computer world, proprietary systems are the 'bad guys' not the OS.
yyrkoon - Thursday, July 31, 2008 - link
http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread...Companies need to learn that business tactics as such will put you into a world of hurt in a hurry. Behold the wonderful internet at its finest.
swaaye - Friday, August 1, 2008 - link
Just how much of an audience in the real world do you think slashdot gets? lol.swaaye - Friday, August 1, 2008 - link
or any site, for that matter.