ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3... what am I missing?

From what I have seen I would tend to let LLC at off.

It's a pity that, even with all the settings made easy for overclock a I7 with 'k', they didn't think that we would like to take control of the voltage without affecting the speedstep low clock voltage (1.6 GHz).

I had CrystalCPUID before, this program was perfect, I used it on many machines. With my last configuration, I had the control on the voltage so that I could set the voltage at 2.2 GHz (speedstep low clock) and control each voltage level for the upper clocks until 3.3 GHz.

Isn't there any equivalent software for I7 ?
 
I think this is the way intel implemented it so not much can be done about that.
Well didn't really affect me since I'm running offset at +0,005V setting :D
 
I guess I will have to stay at 4.5 GHz. I find the CPU a little hot and I wanted to look at the lowest voltage I could go. I tried with lower voltage in offset mode, but I got unstable at idle because the offset mode changes the 1.6 GHz voltage too.
 
Have you checked that level x setting ?
If you go with negative offset try setting it to lvl 3 or 4.

I though you wanted to have + offset and keep idle voltage which is impossible.
 
I currently have:
- 0.992V @ 1.6 GHz
- 1.288V @ 4.5 GHz

I want to test:
- 0.992V @ 1.6 GHz
- 1.270V @ 4.5 GHz

But I can't. LLC is useless because it will affect both voltages and it's bad. Look at anandtech article. We don't want to go against intel specifications. LLC removes intel overvoltage protection when switching from loaded to idle, speedstep or not.
 
So whats the final verdict on this mobo? Worth getting or is it something we should avoid? Its one I have on my list that I'm considering getting. I have never owned an ASRock mobo before and I'm a little leery it may not be up to par quality wise.
 
It's my second Asrock mobo. The first was Conroe865PE and this one was precious to me, enabling me to get 775 CPU with old RAM and GPU. I was totally satisfied with it.

This one is also great, but I'm not using it at its full potential. One thing I sure love is this I5 2500k. When I boot I don't even see the completed Win7 logo, it's on my desktop before that !
 
TehQuick said:
Are you sure it's thanks to CPU and NOT the ssd? :p
Click to expand...

It's both. With the Q6600 @ 3.3 GHz I was able to see the logo and I could count a few seconds before seeing the welcome screen. It was the same Windows installation and the same SSD.
 
Hey I was planning on buying another pair of ram but I saw on a manufacturer response on newegg that XMP does not work for 2 pairs of RAM sticks. Can anyone confirm this ?
 
My son has this board and it's running a "Pentium" G860 @ 3ghz. He's got dual GTX 260's in SLI and the only fault we can see so far is Windows 7 x64 / Nvidia Control Panel will see both GPU's. At the end of the night, he powers down his computer. When he wakes up, Windows 7 / Nvidia Control Panel both report ONE GPU installed. It's happened two night in a row. Today, I ended up removing both GPU's, doing a clean install on his drivers and even swapped his two cards around. So far so good.. We shall see if that worked. I'm still unsure if it was / is a problem with the GPU's, drivers or the motherboard. Keeping my fingers crossed. Other than that, this board has been really solid (but we aren't overclocking).
 
A pentium and SLI ? Isn't that a mismatch ?

To all, I got 2 answers, one from ASRock and the other from Patriot, it's best to use identical RAM for XMP to work. I decided to buy 16GB of RAM at 65$ from newegg and solve the problem. I ended up having 13GB of unused RAM :eek:
 
kensiko said:
A pentium and SLI ? Isn't that a mismatch ?

To all, I got 2 answers, one from ASRock and the other from Patriot, it's best to use identical RAM for XMP to work. I decided to buy 16GB of RAM at 65$ from newegg and solve the problem. I ended up having 13GB of unused RAM :eek:
Click to expand...

LOL.. To the contrary. My son upgraded from a 2.4ghz socket 775 setup. He kept his dual GPU's and migrated to the 1155 socket. Since he is strictly a gamer, the dual core G860 @ 3ghz / 1155 socket setup almost DOUBLED his frame rates for the games that he plays (Rift and Global Agenda). We are actually digging the Asrock Z68.

Can't speak on the ram issue.. We have 8gb's of Gskill DDR3 1600 (2 x 4gb's). It's been really happy with those modules (7-8-7-24 @ 1T). We just clicked the XMP profile and it worked flawlessly.
 
kensiko said:
That is LLC, Load Line Calibration.

That feature is bad, that's why don't want to activate it. If you want to know why it's bad, read that:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2404/5

Load Line calibration at level 5 is the same as deactivated.
Click to expand...

Kensiko: can you please STOP spamming these forums with that FUD? Look at the damn date of that article !!! It was proven YEARS ago that that article is WRONG. LLC is *NOT* bad, as long as you keep your load voltages close to the same as your bios or idle voltages. If LLC is BAD, then higher vcores WITHOUT LLC is JUST as bad, which means overclocking by raising vcore is BAD. which means.....PUT ON YOUR TINFOIL HAT AND STOP USING COMPUTERS!

Use your head and stop being an unintelligent gibberling.
If your CPU needs 1.4v to be stable at 5 ghz, with LLC, with very momentary spikes to 1.45v (we're talking nanosecond spikes here), and 1.43v at idle, you say this is worse, when WITHOUT LLC, you would need 1.5v (!!) vcore set in BIOS to give 1.4v at full load thanks to vdroop, and which results in 1.47v at idle.

Now which is worse?
Of course you'll still say LLC is worse even though the voltages are higher with LLC off, since you won't even try to understand what I wrote.....
 
Falkentyne said:
Kensiko: can you please STOP spamming these forums with that FUD? Look at the damn date of that article !!! It was proven YEARS ago that that article is WRONG. LLC is *NOT* bad, as long as you keep your load voltages close to the same as your bios or idle voltages. If LLC is BAD, then higher vcores WITHOUT LLC is JUST as bad, which means overclocking by raising vcore is BAD. which means.....PUT ON YOUR TINFOIL HAT AND STOP USING COMPUTERS!

Use your head and stop being an unintelligent gibberling.
If your CPU needs 1.4v to be stable at 5 ghz, with LLC, with very momentary spikes to 1.45v (we're talking nanosecond spikes here), and 1.43v at idle, you say this is worse, when WITHOUT LLC, you would need 1.5v (!!) vcore set in BIOS to give 1.4v at full load thanks to vdroop, and which results in 1.47v at idle.

Now which is worse?
Of course you'll still say LLC is worse even though the voltages are higher with LLC off, since you won't even try to understand what I wrote.....
Click to expand...

I did not mean to cause frustration here, sorry. I did read what you said. I read the anand article slowly, I checked the spike they show by example and it can be very high, that is why I decided not to use it. Now I won't argue anymore, my decision is made and I don't want to change the opinion of the others if they don't want it.
 
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