vis213

Since alot of people have been looking for reviews on the new 790fx/sb750 platform I've decided to do a thorough review on this new board from ASUS that I've gone through hell trying to get.

The review will be in 3 parts:

-Layout of board, ease of use, BIOS features, other features
-Overclocking capabilities with a B2 Phenom (9600be)
-Overclocking capabilities with a B3 Phenom (9850be)

Let's get started!

Shiny box other side is filled to the brim with features of the board, fairly heavy for its size too.


Contents of the box
-Owner's Manual
-Installation DVD
-Two CrossfireX bridges
-PCI panel with 2 USB and 1 Firewire port
-IDE Cable
-Q-Connectors
-Rear IO shield
-4 SATA connectors
-SATA power adapter



The board has a great layout with plenty of room between RAM, CPU, NB, and the first PCI-e slot. The angled SATA and IDE connections are great help as well. Everything is clearly labeled and the build quality is excellent.



With everything loaded on it becomes even more clear how well the layout is. This is many times better than the cramped layout my K9A2 Platinum had.



Here it is ready for testing on my makeshift bench under a coffee table


The BIOS is feature rich and with default settings very clean. When you start changing things to Manual you start to see the many settings you can change.






Set my RAM in the BIOS to 1066 @ 2.05v and it booted straight into Vista no problems. Necessary drivers were installed quickly and easily off the included DVD.


Only problems I've run into so far.

On my open bench my MB temps are reading 45c
ASUS Probe shows my CPU temp 10 degrees higher than core temp
The motherboard won't let go of one of my usb cords, the monster has eaten it!

If there's anything you would like me to test, take a picture of, or anything of that kind please let me know.

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vis213

Lots of toying and lots of rebooting has gone through to see how high I could take my old 9600be. Keep in mind this is purely for the sake of seeing how well this new SB and AMD's ACC helps overclocking over the older platforms. I have done no serious stability testing and no benchmarking. AMD's TLB patch is disabled.

I first started off with all stock clocks and aimed at finding my max voltages for temps I was comfortable with. I ended up with:

CPU vcore - 1.4v
CPU-NB - 1.4v
HT voltage - 1.3v

The CPU NB voltage is what really wakes up these Phenoms, just a small addition to it will help you greatly, the HT voltage helps alot as well when you go for higher ref speeds (220+) These voltages remained constant through the rest of my OCing session.

Next up was finding my max reference speed. I turned my multiplier down to 11x, dropped the NB multi to 8x, dropped the HT speed to 1600mhz, and then took down the memory divider to 667. Here's my max result bootable into Vista.



Very impressive indeed, with the same chip on my MSI K9A2 platinum I capped out at 215.

Next up was the multi. Same settings as before with default (200) reference speed. Bootable into Vista



This matched what was achievable on my K9A2 but I found loads more stability with the ASUS.

Now is the time it became fun.Tons of multi/ref speed combinations were tried. Keep in mind this is with ACC off the entire time. I hit a the stability wall around 2.87, bootable into Vista but 30 seconds of p95 and core 3 would crap out on me. Sorry no screenshots. This is where my ACC strategy kicked in. I would run p95 waiting for a core to fail and with that core I would go into the BIOS and adjust ACC for that specific core. Hours later here are my final results.

CPU multi - 12
CPU reference - 253
NB multiplier - 8x
HT speed - 1800



This is very impressive over my old motherboard, especially considering the high reference speed achievable. ACC made a world of difference between getting 2.87 and the 3.03 you see here. I will say 3.1 was bootable but I kept having one core give up and with BSOD you have no way of knowing which one so I didn't feel like wasting time on trying tons more ACC combinations. Also I see no difference between having ACC on or off when it comes to seeing if a certain configuration would be Vista bootable, it all came down to actual stability when stressed (p95, occt etc..)

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vis213

This OC-athon really didn't start out that well and I thought I was headed into a world of disappointment. With 1.375 vcore and nb-cpu voltage I was hitting a max of 250 ref and only 15 (gasp) multi. Anything else would not post. Then I got brave and jumped into 1.4 and things really livened up. I stopped at 1.45 for the remainder of this but 1.5 for me is definatly doable for suicide runs but I deemed it unnecessary (even though I wanted to hit the magic 3.5)

dropping memory to 533 effective, HT multi x7, NB multi x7 yielded me an amazing 289 ref speed. this blows away what I could get out of my 9600 and annihilates anything remotely close to what I could get from the k9a2 platinum. anything higher would not post. I'm sure 1.5vcore could net me 295-300 ref speed


Up next was multi. This was also a big jump between 1.375 and 1.45 volts. a max multi of 17 was very impressive indeed and the only thing stopping me from going higher was Vista, I could post at 17.5


Now was the tricky bit, finding the max overall achievable CPU speed. This took tons of reboots with failed boots both POST and into Vista and while what I could get out of it was really good, still disappointed I couldn't quite get that 3.5 (1ghz OC) that I was looking for


ASUS has brought something extremely good to the Phenom enthusiast market with this board. The overall increases with both a B2 and B3 stepping chip was done extremely well and these are numbers I'm putting out with just a Xigmatek cooler. I'm sure with a TRUE I could hit that 3.5 and with water cooling? Oh boy please don't, I'm having a hard enough time trying not to drop the case on a WC setup...My Xigmatek can take me to 3.5 but the instant I put any load I'm sure I'll create another sun.

With that said here are my tips for OCing on a 790fx/sb750 board.

-voltage, voltage, voltage. This is key. Phenoms love 1.4+ volts on the core, this is the point where most chips will really come alive, hell I'm thinking of tossing the 9600 back in and throwing 1.5 volts just to see what I can get

-CPU-NB voltage. No one talks about this much but this is just as important as the core voltage, if you are not upping this with your core you might as well just give up. Always up this to match your core voltage (cpu 1.4, cpu-nb 1.4)

- NB freq and HT link. This is how quickly everything in your system will talk to each other. Keeping this high without going too high is what'll keep you POSTing. I found the 9850 topping around 2400, keep it around 2000 throughout your OC trials. The 9950 is good to 2600, again keeping around 2200 while OC. 9600 is good for maybe 2200, 1800 being the OC number.

- ACC. IT DOES WORK. With ACC disabled in the BIOS I couldn't post past 3.2ghz. On auto it was barely higher. Find out which cores are weak and bump up their settings. My 9850 likes 2%/2%/4%/2%

That's it I guess lol. Thanks for the read and PM me if anyone ever needs help with this board in particular or Phenom OCing in general.

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Gen

Looking good, REP+

Wish I could get one, but I'd like to get a new case first. It would be several months until I could get it and by then might as well wait for AM3...

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vis213

Ok new problems.

Q-Fan likes to keep my cpu fan off.

Doesn't look like the board accepts 1066 in dual channel

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mksteez

sweet! maybe you can try adding a fan on that NB

sweet_3025

Eager to see how it deals with the 9600BE.

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thr33niL

Reps don't even cover it! Nice to see someone up and running.

Uhhhh... Whaaaa?

vis213

I cant get it to run dual channel at all in 1066.

Straight out of the book
Also out of the book
Uhm putting them in the yellow slots results in no POST

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Penicilyn

Just wait, I'm sure it will be fixed shortly with a BIOS update.

Are you running the newest BIOS?

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