New
#1051
Have to careful with these new boards; new BIOS update are coming in fast. With the X79 Chipset you no longer have the separate North and South Bridges, just the one chip.
The VRM is protected by a small heatsink and there has been a couple of these boards that have actually caught fire and taken out the processors at the same time.
I have my test benches setup with extra direct cooling on the VRM area as well as cooling the processor with water but still keep a close eye on the MB temps as well as the processor temps.
The new BIOS from what I can tell is keeping a better eye on the temps and will cause throttle on CPU speed to help with the temps and have other nice tweaks with them to boot.
So far the best OC'ing board I have tested is the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe hitting 5GHz on it is pretty simple.
I'm not sure of the reaspn, but the truth is that, at least with the P67 and Z68 boards, the FSB in bios is 100 and CPUz reads ir as 99.8. I don't know if it is a Sandy Bridge fault ot a CPUz fault, but everyone I've seen is that way. Although it is considered a no-no, I changed mine to 100.2 and CPUz reads it as 100.2. If you change it from auto to manual and set it to 100, it is still read as 99.8. Go figure!