Sandy Bridge build

[Andre S. Veteran]

The software that comes with the mobo does automatic overcloking, so right away it had it running at 4.3Ghz.

Check your CPU voltage with CPUZ. I wouldn't trust the auto-overclocking utility, I know the MSI OC Genie tends to set the voltage way too high, and HardOCP had a lot of trouble with the P8P67-Deluxe as well.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

CPU-Z is showing the voltage maxing out at around 1.1v (slightly higher in reality)

It's kinda hard though since the system is going from 1.6Ghz to 4.3Ghz, and the voltage reading isn't updating at the same time (it seems to update slightly later)

Edit: Just saw it hit 1.2v

[Andre S. Veteran]

That's actually quite low, so if it's stable, good. :)

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

It actually hit 1.3v while doing a more consistent test (which removed the speed fluctuations)

It's perfectly stable, the only issue I've had is that it wouldn't wake from sleep (which I've seen on multiple systems, so I just end up disabling it)

[Andre S. Veteran]

That's an old Intel bug, you're not the only one affected. Only solution is really to not use the sleep feature, as far as I know.

1.3v is ok for that overclock. 1.4-1.5v is actually common when you try to push it to 4.8-5ghz.

[Dashel]

Have the B3 revision chips landed on any current boards yet? Any reason to not just wait for the Z68 at this time?

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

The B3 revision has been out for a while, mine's a B3.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Any reason to not just wait for the Z68 at this time?

Any reason to wait for the Z68? It's really for people who won't use a dedicated graphics card but still want the unlocked multiplier, and that's a really small market segment I think.

[arrrgh]

Sleep bug is most often caused by CPU PLL Overvoltage setting in BIOS. If you really want to sleep then you should try disabling that option in BIOS (on Asus boards both auto and enabled cause the issue). Turning it off could require some voltage tweaks to keep the system otherwise stable.

Z68 primarily gives you onboard video while keeping the advanced OC features of P67. Z68 also seems to give a new feature called SSD caching, basically lets you use SSD (if you have one) to speed up regular HDDs (works like homebrew hybrid drive). I think these are the main differences between P67/Z68.

[omganinja]

Swap board to a Gigabyte, and HDD to a Western Digital and use an SSD as primary drive and you've got yourself a pretty decent system.

[Dashel]

Well, both the SSD caching and Quick Sync seem like huge wins to me since it will be an oc'd gaming rig that will also be encoding. I don't think insane 'background' encoding times would be a small market segment.

Couldn't have been that long, I forgot Intel was able to get them pushed out by mid instead of late Febuary so I guess mid-March was about right. Just wanted to make sure.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Meh. SSDs are overpriced and Quick Sync won't accelerate x264, so I don't care about either. But I did overlook those features so thanks for the precision.

[Vice]

Nice system Decryptor. Put a water block on it and take that chip to 5GHz :devil:

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

It hit 4.6Ghz for a couple of seconds a few days ago for some reason, the FSB jumped a bit and the multiplier took it up. Realistically it maxes out at about 4.2-4.3Ghz though.

[Dashel]

Meh. SSDs are overpriced and Quick Sync won't accelerate x264, so I don't care about either. But I did overlook those features so thanks for the precision.

Well, I think power users will still be better manually segregating their data to SSD but I'm curious to try it with a cheaper 32GB drive. I was surprised to hear that it doesn't help boot times though. I use hardware capable h.264 encoding via MediaExpresso so x264 isn't really an issue for me I guess. x264 doesn't support GPU based encoding of any kind.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

My graphics card does H.264 decoding, and can do encoding (Nvidia showed it off with Microsoft a while back), but I prefer to use a well known encoder like x264.

I would have liked to use an SSD in this build (and had been saying I was going to for ages), but it's $160 for the absolute cheapest (60GB OCZ), while I got 2TB of storage for $110 by going with HD's (one of which failed 3 days after building the system, so I had to get it replaced)

[Andre S. Veteran]

I don't expect Quick Sync to look nearly as good as an x264 encode, for an equivalent bitrate, but it could make sense if keeping the CPU free is more valuable than saving bitrate. Not my cup of tea.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

I did a test encode of a video using x264, I got a pretty consistent 80fps+. At that point the speed improvements really don't offer much "more" (It'd have to be much faster than 3x to get me to use it over x264)