Just some feedback on i7 2600K, Z68 build

On New Years Eve I built a new system with the Asus P8Z68 Deluxe/Gen3, mobo and all I can say "is it wicked". My new vid card is a AMD 6970 2Gig and I tried it in my 775 mobo when I first got it and it was so loud we couldn't here the TV. It was terrible.

When I installed it in my new Asus mobo and fired the system up for the first time I actually thought the card wasn't working because I heard no noise. I was panicing for a split second and grabbed my flashlight and shined it on the fan of the vid card to see if it was spinning and low and behold it was running to my amazement. The system is so quiet you don't know it's running.

This mobo is a dark shade of blue, light shade of blue, white with blue low profile Corsair DDR3 1600. It's a sharp board. Will definitely get a case with a side window in it.

This mobo has everything you could want and it is rock solid. It just goes to show you since my last build 4 1/2 yrs ago how far technology has come. If any of you are thinking of building one this mobo is a superior choice.

I have 16Gig of ram on Win7 64bit to run multiple VM's and Video Editing.

It overclocked to 4.5 with vcore 1.24. I'm gonna run the extreme profile and see how much further I can push it just to see what kind of chip I have.

System Specs:

i7 2600K
Asus P8Z68 Deluxe/Gen3 O.C to 4.5
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Corsair Vengeance 16Gig DDR3 1600 Low Profile
Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 @GB GDDR5
Pioneer D-216 Super Multi Drive
Thermaltake 1200watt Power Supply
Win 7 64-bit
Viewsonic VX2753mh-LED 27 inch Full HD Widescreen



Happy New Year to all at Wilders!!

 

How many sticks of RAM have you installed (4GBx4, 8GBx2,16GBx1)?

 

Hey there Firecat,

4X4=16

The board recognized all the sticks right off the bat. It does default to 1333MH so all I had to do was go into the bios and change it to 1600MH and then set the timings to 9-9-9-24.

I have it running on a open air tech station until I figure out what case I'm going to get. It's purring along nicely.

 

I do think you can get those Vengeance sticks to go beyond 1600MHz, or tighten the timings (what are those big bad heatspreaders for anyway?). I believe you can reach DDR3 1866 on these modules at something like 1.5V?

As for case, well, in my country NZXT is the only real brand selling stuff that's worth taking a look at, so I'm not sure I can even talk about it

BTW, why did you pick the Asus board? I'm sure you had choices, some cheaper than others

 

I'm jealous! Very nice setup.

 

The recommendations I have seen for that platform are to tighten the timings. The returns diminish quickly after 1600. I have a very similar setup and if I were to wish to change anything it would be to be able to afford about 3TB of SSD storage. Or at least 2.

 

Yes, you're right. I haven't had the time to get into yet but I will. I'll push the ram when I OC with the Extreme Profile. I would like to see it at 5.3 or better. Real Good OC'ing chips will do 5.3 and up from what I see over at xtremesystems.com. Average chips will do upto 5.2.

I will have a look.

Well, there were a number of reasons and yes some were cheaper.

When I built my first one I cheaped out on the mobo and I learned never to do that again. It just isn't worth it. Your board is the foundation of your system.

My first board was a Gigabyte $160.00 board and it had a problem with overvolting my ram. It didn't start doing it until the third year of ownership. I blew 4 sticks (2 at a time) of Crucial Ballistix and done a RMA on them. There was nothing I could do about the problem except get rid of the board. And there were no bells and whistles of course. It didn't even have a firewire port.

The new Corsair ram is Low Profile (and looks better) so it would get a long with any heatsink I used. I don't like the big teeth on the Vengeance ram or G.Skill. I'm a low profile gal.

This is the board I mentioned in my first post about me sticking my new vid card in this board 775 socket and fired it up just to make sure it worked when I got it and it was so loud you couldn't hear the TV. That's because the board didn't have any kind of intelligent power phase design.

I read a lot of different reviews about the Asus board at many different tech sites as well as Newegg.com where I buy all my stuff. I ordered my mobo, CPU, ram, heatsink on Dec 24, 2011. I already bought the vid card the month before.

This board is a OC'ers dream. Asus done a fantastic job on the BIOS. Very easy to navigate. You can OC with a click of the mouse instead of doing it the old way in BIOS and you would have to write eveything down for all the settings you were trying as you went what worked and what didn't. More time too. Asus loads there boards up, no doubt about that.

Features of the board I liked:

1) PCI Express 3.0

PCI Express® 3.0 (PCIe 3.0) is the latest PCI Express bus standard with improved encoding schemes that provide twice the performance of current PCIe 2.0. Total bandwidth for a x16 link reaches a maximum of 32GB/s, double the 16GB/s of PCIe 2.0 (in x16 mode). As such, PCIe 3.0 provides users unprecedented data speeds, combined with the convenience and seamless transition offered by complete backward compatibility with PCIe 1.0 and PCIe 2.0 devices. PCIe 3.0 will become a must-have feature for users who wish to improve and optimize graphic performance, as well as have the latest technology available to them.

Eventually this will be useful.

2) UEFI BIOS (EZ Mode)

Flexible & Easy BIOS Interface
Exclusive to ASUS motherboards, its UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the first ever mouse-controlled graphical BIOS interface designed with dual selectable modes. It delivers a user-friendly interface that goes beyond traditional keyboard-only BIOS controls to enable more flexible and convenient input with quick scrolling. Users can easily navigate the UEFI BIOS with the smoothness of their operating system. Quick and simple overclocking and setup sharing is facilitated by the F12 hotkey BIOS snapshot feature. The exclusive EZ Mode displays frequently-accessed setup info, while the Advanced Mode is for experienced performance enthusiasts that demand far more intricate system control, including detailed DRAM information.

Supports Hard Drives over 2.2TB
ASUS UEFI BIOS natively supports hard drives larger than 2.2TB in 64-bit, with full storage space utilization helping deliver far more exciting computing than traditional BIOS versions.

Exclusive ASUS Interface

• EZ Mode - gives easy access to selectable, optimized system modes, clear system info display and drag and drop boot prioritizing
• Advanced Mode - for experienced performance enthusiasts that demand intricate system settings .

3)
LucidLogix® Virtu

Universal Switchable Graphics Technology
LucidLogix® Virtu is designed for the Intel® Sandy Bridge platform's powerful integrated graphics. Its GPU virtualization dynamically assigns tasks to the best available graphics resources based on power, performance and system load on Windows® 7 based PCs. It allows users to fully utilize the unique capabilities of advanced Sandy Bridge multimedia features alongside the high end 3D rendering performance provided by installed graphics cards. When no discrete graphics are needed, the graphics card is put in idle mode to lower utilization, heat, fan speed and power draw down to near zero, making the system more environmentally-friendly. For users with diverse needs, LucidLogix® Virtu GPU virtualization provides great flexibility and efficiency.

Universal Switchable Graphics
LucidLogix® Virtu's GPU virtualization technology assigns tasks to the best available GPU, allowing dynamic graphics switching between integrated graphics and NVIDIA® or AMD graphics cards.

3X Faster Video Conversion
With switchable graphics, all ASUS P8Z68 Series motherboards leverage the transcoding power of Sandy Bridge, allowing users to enjoy three times faster video conversion with Intel® Quick Sync Video technology.

4) Dual Intelligent Processors 2 with DIGI+ VRM

Digital Power Design: The New Standard
The world’s first Dual Intelligent Processors from ASUS pioneered the use of two onboard chips - EPU (Energy Processing Unit) and TPU (TurboV Processing Unit). The new generation of Dual Intelligent Processors 2 with DIGI+ VRM provides precise Vcore PWM, integrated graphics voltages and frequency module adjustments with minimal power loss through BIOS tuning and an exclusive user interface to increase the board’s overclocking range while performance reaches its full potential. ASUS DIGI+ VRM digital power design empowers users with superior flexibility and perfect precision to ensure optimized performance, extreme system stability and greater power efficiency.

DIGI+ VRM

Herald the Arrival of a New Digital Power Design Era
VRM, or voltage regulator modules, are considered among the most essential motherboard design components. They supply the voltage demanded by the CPU, and a good VRM must intelligently detect actual CPU power draw to provide precise power accordingly. ASUS DIGI+ VRM is an innovative, industry-leading technology that fully integrates Intel® VRD12 specifications on a native level, greatly enhancing power to go far beyond the limits of analog design.
Advantages of ASUS DIGI+ VRM Digital Power Design
Unlike previous VRD versions, Intel® VRD12 uses digital signals (SVID). To ensure perfect power delivery, ASUS specially designed DIGI+ VRM to sync completely with this new technology.
Faster sensing and response: ASUS DIGI+ VRM acts as a digital controller to perfectly match digital power signal (SVID) requests from the CPU, eliminating digital-to-analog conversion lag.

Better cooling: exclusive dual driver and MOS design doubles the heat dissipation area with expanded cooling surfaces for improved thermal performance. Spacing components out over a wider area speeds up cooling to enhance reliability and stability.

2X CPU power supply: the same exclusive dual driver and MOS design also provides twice the CPU power supply with two complete power stages. This results in far greater phase load tolerances, so the CPU never has to wait for power to arrive, increasing performance and overclocking potential.

Active Cooling for Extreme Durability- Super Cool VRM
ASUS DIGI+ VRM delivers intelligent power management to balance loadings for each power phase by detecting VRM temperatures to ensure longer component lifespan and better cooling.

5) TPU

The Ultimate Turbo Processor
Unleash your performance with ASUS' simple onboard switch or AI Suite II utility. The TPU chip offers precise voltage control and advanced monitoring through Auto Tuning , GPU Boost and TurboV functions. Auto Tuning offers a user friendly way to automatically optimize the system for fast, yet stable clock speeds, while TurboV enables unlimited freedom to adjust CPU frequencies and ratios for optimized performance in diverse situations.

6) EPU

Energy Efficiency All Around
Tap into the world's first real-time PC power saving chip through a simple onboard switch or AI Suite II utility. Get total system-wide energy optimization by automatically detecting current PC loadings and intelligently moderating power consumption. This also reduces fan noise and extends component longevity.

The list goes on and on. There is nothing not to like about this board. I wanted a better quality board so I was willing to pay the price. From now on I will stick with this modo. This board has 8 sata ports.

The original board I was going to buy was $360.00. Maximus IV Extreme-Z but it had too many issues including alot of DOA boards. I then decided to look for something that didn't have all these issues and I found the Asus P8Z68 Deluxe/Gen3 and it was $90.00 cheaper.

This board runs extremely quiet. I have a 140mm fan on my heatsink and you cannot here but a very low hum from the fan. It's not intrusive.

I haven't bought a SSD drive because they are too expensive. I will get one when they come down in price. As for now my older Sata 3.0's work fine. I will buy a nice sound card though, not sure which one.

When I build a system I always use my open air tech station to make sure all hardware works properly before screwing everything down in the case. A lot less headaches.

It has a power swich, reset switch, clear cmos and a Mem OK switch to see if your ram is compatible. I seen a lot of reviews at Newegg where people were complaining the board didn't work with the ram they bought and blamed Asus and Newegg cuz they had to send it back so they said. It's there fault they didn't do their homework before they bought the board. There is a QVL (qualified vendor list) list for all qualified ram that works with this board at Asus site. This is what I always go by so there is no issues.

This will be compatible with future 22nm processors like Ivy Bridge also.

http://usa.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8Z68V_PROGEN3/

 

Thank you

 

@Rilla927: Yeah, simplicity is a big point for Asus - they always have the easiest BIOS around. In your case the board has UEFI, and it's a real treat!

Although, I guess Asus' BIOS can be a little picky at times - I built a value system for my friend and he plugged in a really cheap no-name keyboard which the BIOS wouldn't recognize. I replaced it with a Logitech and all was fine.

I guess a quality board demands quality peripherals too

I also built a Sandy Bridge rig a few months back, but I really couldn't afford an Asus board. It's premium quality but also premium price. Settled for a Biostar board instead, it's also very good. Not nearly as simple to tweak around as Asus though. It too has a reset switch, power switch, CMOS clear, etc. but no MEMOK.

I've seen Asus boards with MemOK, I think it's a great tool - it not only checks compatibility but also tweaks around the settings to find the timings and speed that will work for the motherboard if it is incompatible at first boot.

This is my board:

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=546

It supports GEN3, it's not exactly highly feature rich and has only 6 SATA ports but it gets the job done, has many awards and great reviews (and it fit my student budget).

My personal opinion is that the Asus ROG boards (Maximus, Sabertooth, etc.) are not worth the price premium over the "regular" models. In my experience, their only REAL advantage is that those boards usually run cooler because of more thermally conductive materials used in the manufacturing.

Anyway, hope you're having fun with your build!

 

Its useless OC ram on the new cpu's. They got big enough caches anyways.