Table of Contents:
Overclocking the Maximus V Gene was easy as expected due to the many BIOS options, which enable such a finite level of tweaking that tuning in an extreme overclock is very simple. For our testing we settled for a 4.6GHz overclock as the 22nm lithography of the Ivy Bridge CPU is showing that during overclocking we definitely see temps rise rather quickly the harder its pushed. We have seen in many tests and demo’s where memory can be pushed in excess of 3000MHz which speaks volumes to the strength of the IMC itself on the Ivy Bridge CPU and also the level of engineering that went into the development of the Maximus V Gene and its BIOS.
We did all of our testing on a Cooler Master TPC 812 cooler so therefore any of the tests we run should be easily reproducible by anyone with a decent air cooler. The 4.6 was not even close to the max we could achieve but as we pushed north of 4.8+ GHz we did start to see temps really start heading up and we figure for best reliability and performance around the 4.6-4.8GHz range is a good safe zone for most all users.
After doing some benchmarking we went ahead and strapped a single stage unit to the board to see what we could expect from some extreme benchmarking and we were quite pleased to see that with the older Vapochill unit we were able to achieve a 5.5GHz overclock with relative benchmark stability but the unit was getting overloaded and we think were going to have to take another crack at this pretty soon with some heavier hardware. But for demonstration purposes it is definitely not a bad result and shows the capability of the platform given some serious cooling hardware. Given we have the time and resources to run some Dry Ice or LN2 benches we think we could show off some much better results.
