Make sure to watch the video for all the clues.

Please make sure to submit all answers to the YouTube page no later than the 30th June 2010, the winner will be announced on the 1st July 2010, and prizes sent out that day to the lucky winner.

Check out BenchTec’s YouTube channel while you’re there as well! BenchTec UK

Good luck to all!

Note: Intel supplied me with the parts used in this video but is not running this competition.

First up, let’s let Foxconn introduce themselves and the Quantum Force line up:

Amen! That sort of mission statement is exactly what we’re after here at BenchTec, a committment to enthusiasts and overclockers to produce the sorts of motherboard we dream of…hopefully!

There’s been a few unsubstantiated rumours flying round about Foxconn’s Quantum Force division, suggesting that it’s closing down and they won’t be making or supporting motherboards soon. That’s simply not true folks, QF will have a couple of new P55 motherboards (called the Infernal Katana) and there’s more to come after that.

Specifications:

Now if specifications aren’t your sort of thing I’ll move swifty on to the retail packaging and the board itself. Here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

Packaging

Nice box, colourful, interesting. That’s about all you can say about the box!

The Board

Oh yes, Foxconn kept the same red and black colour scheme for their budget board that they did for their premium BloodRAGE. This is a big plus for the motherboard in my opinion, it’s a shame other manufacturers spoil the appearance of cheap boards with dull brown PCBs. The board also has the same ‘quality’ feel to it like the BloodRAGE.

Video Tour:

BIOS:

FlamingBlade Bios:

It seems like it is possible to flash the non-GTI FlamingBlade BIOS to this board. I suspect this will unlock SLI for the board and can now see the little SLI logo in the corner of the splash screen. It also appears to unlock RAID for the board, but it only enables the option in the BIOS, you aren’t able to configure any RAID drives as this is obviously missing from the hardware. It also unlocks some hidden DIMM voltage options.

Test System:

Foxconn FlamingBlade GTI (P06 BIOS)
Intel Core i7 920 (C0 Stepping)
2GB A-DATA Vitesta Extreme Edition DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20
nVidia Geforce 9500GT
Antec TPQ-1KW

Vapochill LS Phase-Change unit.

Tests and Results:

Simply great results. This board matched the BloodRAGE clock-for-clock and out-clocked a full range of boards from MSI and Gigabyte as tested by other BenchTec reviewers.

I’ll say that again, just so it’s not missed. This board hit the highest benchable bclk for every benchmark that BenchTec reviewers have seen. Now, whether I’d recommend this over a board from MSI, Gigabyte or Asus depends on a  lot more factors than raw performance, but this is a very big tick in the performance column for Foxconn and I’m impressed.

CPU-Z:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=635308

SuperPi 1M:
227×21=4771Mhz
BenchTec #1

Pifast:
228×21=4793Mhz
BenchTec #1

SuperPi 32M:
224×21=4708Mhz
BenchTec #1

wPrime 32M:
221×21=4644Mhz
BenchTec #1

wPrime 1024M:
218×21=4591Mhz
BenchTec #1

3DMark05:
224×21=4708Mhz
BenchTec #1

3DMark06:
217×21=4559Mhz
BenchTec #1

Usage:

One thing I like to do when I review a board is to talk a bit about how the board is to use. It’s my way of trying to convey all those aspects of using a motherboard that you don’t get from just screenshots and pictures.

The FlamingBlade GTI is a pretty well behaved board. I leave the word ‘pretty’ in due to a couple of niggles that I experienced. When upping the PCI-E Frrequency over a certain amount, whenever the board rebooted, it would hang on the debug LED code “PP” and then kick in the overclock recovery. I wasn’t able to find out exactly where in the PCI-E scale this happened, but it could be down to a bad solder job as I needed to mod the board to go above 103Mhz. Don’t fret though, new retail boards don’t need this mod so you may not even see this issue.

The last thing is that this board overvolts the DDR3 by about 0.03v. Not a huge amount, but with reports of Elpida “Hyper” memory modules being extremely sensitive, giving them 1.68v when you think you’ve within the 1.65v limit is a little concern. That being said, now you know, you can happily set 1.62v in the BIOS and rest easy.

Conclusion

When you take a manufacturer’s bottom-end board, priced aggresively and gunning for the builder-on-a-budget, you expect to scraping the barrel with regards to good things to say about it. This board thoroughly surprised and pleased me. It’s built and works in the same way as the top of the range BloodRAGE and it performs equally as well.

The lack of RAID is something worth pointing out, but there’s the non-GTI FlamingBlade for that if you need. SLI is supported (unofficially) as well as Crossfire (officially), and the spacing between the slots is perfect for a two-card setup allowing the top card to breathe. Also, on-board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons would make things a heck of a lot easier. That being said, I only needed to clear the CMOS once, the overclock recovery works very well.

I’d recommend this board to anyone building an i7 system, and as long as P55 boards don’t severely undercut it in price, the triple channel DDR3 should keep it ahead in the benchmarks. There’s also future planning with Intel’s 6-core CPU’s rumoured to be just around the corner and only supporting the X58 chipset, these will be just a BIOS update away.

First up, let’s let Foxconn introduce themselves and the Quantum Force line up:

Amen! That sort of mission statement is exactly what we’re after here at BenchTec, a committment to enthusiasts and overclockers to produce the sorts of motherboard we dream of…hopefully!

Specifications:

• The latest motherboard the Quantum Force segment,based on Intel® X58 chipset
• Supports Intel® Core™ i7 and i7 Extreme processors with Intel® QPI technology
• 4*PCle2.0 x16 slots with ATI CrossFireX™ and NVIDIA SLI™ support
• 3 channel DDR3 memory suppprt up to 1800MHz(O.C.)
• Quantum Power- advanced motherboard power system including 14 phase Hybrid PWM and DirectFET™ MOSFET technology
• 4in1 Quantum Cooler provides unique modular NB/SB/VRM cooling solution with inter-changeable NBcooling adaptors for air,water or extreme cooling
• SONAR X-Fi audio card provides outstanding audio fidelity and supports the latest gaming sound effects
• Bundled QF Panel for quick & easy overclocking from case-mounted 5 1/4 drive bay device
• Quantum BIOS provides new features and enhancements for overclocking including context-driven menus
• Serial Attached SCSI interface brings high-performance storage solutions to desktop PCs

Now if specifications aren’t your sort of thing I’ll move swifty on to the retail packaging and the board itself. Here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

Packaging

Pretty standard packaging, it’s going to stand out on a shop shelf nicely.

The Board

Wow, what can you say? That has to be one of the best looking motherboards I’ve ever seen. Anything with a black PCB looks good to start with, but I love red and it just tops it off. Other manufacturers take note, 2 or 3 colours MAXIMUM to a motherboard please!

Video Tour:

Results:

Check the results thread here:

http://www.benchtec.co.uk/forums/showpost.php?p=41459&postcount=25

Introduction:

The Brand new MSI Eclipse SLI motherboard features the latest Socket 1366 supporting Intel Core i7 series CPU’s, and triple channel memory for even greater performance over previous generation CPUs.

At the heart of the motherboard is the new Intel X58 chipset, providing 3x PCI-e slots for both Nvidia and ATI crossfire multi GPU graphics. Although this current motherboard only supports 8 lanes on the middle PCI-e slot for tri-Sli, a future revision to the board will feature an Nvidia N-Force 200 chip for full 3 way x16 slots.

Building on the success of its previous generation P45D Platinum motherboards, MSI has aimed this straight at the enthusiasts market, offering fantastic build quality in a feature rich package. So, does this board have what it takes to compete with Asus, Foxconn and Gigabyte for crown of best X58 mobo? Read on, as BenchTecUK are about to find out!

Packaging:

Nice packaging has a feel of quality to it, makes you feel your £280 was well spent. The inclusion of a Creative X-Fi is a very welcomed addition. Not only does this sound great when gaming or watching movies, but also for the more “Hardcore” among us, can be removed when benching.

The Motherboard:

Ample accessory pack includes everything you could wish for in a high end motherboard such as this. The only downside however is the lack of a Tri-SLi bridge, CrossfireX is supported though with 2x CF bridge connectors. A temperature probe is also included that connecs to the “D-LEDz” display and enables temperature readout from any selected system component.

The Creative X-Fi audio card (PCI-e x1), D-LEDz display module and the MSI “Green Power Genie” for system power monitoring and energy reduction.

Specifications:

CPU

Supports Intel® i7 based processors in LGA1366 package

Chipset

Intel® X58 Chipset

• Supports QPI up to 6.4GT/s

Intel® ICH10R Chipset

• Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) controller, 480Mb/sec, up to 12 ports.
• 6 SATAII ports with transfer rate up to 3Gb/s.
• PCI Master v2.3, I/O APIC.
• ACPI 2.0 compliant.
• Serial ATA RAID 0/1/5/10.
• Integrated AHCI controller.

Main Memory

• Supports six unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600 SDRAM, 24GB Max
• Supports 1Gb/ 2Gb/ 4Gb DRAM size
• Supports x8 / x16 data lines per DIMM
• Supports up to 3 channel mode

Expansion Slots

• 3 PCI Express gen2 x16 slots
• Two Black PCIE x16 slots (PCI_E2 &PCI_E4) support up to PCIE x16 speed, one Blue PCIE x16 slot(PCI_ E5) supports up to PCIE x4 speed
• Supports ATI® Crossfire™, NVIDIA® SLI
• 2 Black PCI Express x1 slots
• 2 PCI slot, support 3.3V/ 5V PCI bus Interface

On-Board IDE/SATA

One Ultra DMA 66/100/133 IDE controller integrated in JMicron® 363.
Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes.
Can connect up to two Ultra ATA drives.

SATAII controller integrated in ICH10R/JMicron® 322 / 362 chipest
Up to 3Gb/s transfer speed.
Supports six SATAII ports by ICH10R
Supports four SATAII ports by JMicron 322, support SATA RAID 0/1/JBOD.
Supports two eSATA ports by JMicron 362.
Supports AHCI controller with SATA RAID 0/1/5/10 by ICH10R.

Audio

Creative® SB X-Fi Xtreme H/W Audio Card (MS-4132)
24-bit / 96KHz audio quality
100dB SNR clarity
Up to 7.1ch EAX 5.0 Surround Sound

LAN

Supports two PCI Express LAN 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Realtek 8111C.

Internal I/O Connectors

ATX 24-Pin power connector
8-pin ATX 12V power connector
CPU / System x 5 FAN connectors
CD-in connector
Front panel audio connector
Front panel connector
1 x chasis intrusion connector
1 x serial port pinheader
2 x USB 2.0 connectors
10 x Serial ATAII connectors
1 x ATA133 connector
1 x IEEE1394 connector support additional 1 port
1 x GreenPower Genie connector
1 x Reset Button
1 x Power Button
1 x SPDIF-out connector
1 x D-LED2 connector
1 x TPM module connector

External I/O Connectors

1 x Clear CMOS button
1 x PS/2 Keyboard
1 x PS/2 Mouse
2 x eSATA ports s
1 x IEEE1394 port
8 x USB 2.0 ports
2 x RJ45 LAN jacks
1 x 5 in 1 + Optical SPDIF out Audio Card

BIOS

The mainboard BIOS provides “Plug & Play” BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically.

The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications.

The BIOS:

Quite possibly the most important thing in any motherboard. You have a bad bios, you have a bad motherboard. Now, I was very eager to put this new bios through it’s paces. MSI have learnt alot over the past 12 months in the bios department, with continued feedback, good and bad, from the BenchTec guys. Myself, Jabski, 4Qman and blindfitter have all abused the previous generation P45 Platinum, giving MSI feedback on problems/quirks all the time. Have they learnt anything ? Well, the thankful answer is YES! At the time of writing, bios v.13b is a joy to work with. Very stable, mem dividers work and so does the crash recovery that caused so many problems on the P45D.

MSI bios engineers are currently working on an up-dated bios to fix the issue that Jabski found concerning raising the CPU multi above x24 when using the i7 965EE. Im sure this issue will be sorted very quickly.

Pretty standard Main BIOS screen.

The “CELL MENU” – This is where we find all of the overclocking options in the Eclipse BIOS.

SPD information can be read from the installed DRAM modules.

DRAM memory timings section.

XMP is supported so no need for tweaking of the memory if your modules support XMP.

MSI have included 4 BIOS settings Save Slots. This is a very handy feature, but ideally could do with the ability to give names to your overclocking profiles. Also worth noting is that when you flash the BIOS, you loose your Saved Overclocking settings!

MSI M-Flash Utility. This feature is very much in its infancy at the moment. If you have this board with BIOS rev 1.2 or earlier DO NOT USE THIS UTILITY TO FLASH THE BIOS! MSI are aware of this utility not working, and are working on fixing it right now. When it works correctly, it will be an awesome tool for the overclocker. It allows for the recovery of a corrupt BIOS by booting off a USB stick, and recovering the BIOS from there. It will also allow you to boot the machine off a BETA BIOS installed on the USB drive, allowing you to test it before commiting to flashing it to the motherboard.

MSI “Green Power” Information:

Hareware system monitoring page. Sadly the voltage montoring options are quite thin on the ground. QPI, NB and Memory voltages would be nice here.

Overclocking:

Now comes the interesting part! How well does this board fair in the all important overclocking stakes? Well, Im pleased to inform you very well indeed!

Test Setup:

CPU – Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz, 45nm, C0 Stepping.
Memory – Crucial Ballistix PC3-12800 3×1GB Tri-Channel DDR3.
Cooling – XSPC Delta CPU Block, BlackIce 120.2, MCP60, 1/2″ Tygon.
Graphics – Nvidia 9800GX2 stock air cooling.

Benchmarks:

First off, 3Dmark06 – Run with HT disabled in bios.

Next up, Quad SLi 3dMark Vantage Performance, this time with HT enabled. This time at 4.1Ghz. I have no doubt this will bench at 4.4Ghz as ‘06 did, but this was an early bench!

Next up, 32mPi. This really shows the power of i7 and triple channel RAM

With HT enabled for a total of 8 threads, I managed a score of 5.950sec in Wprime32m @ 4.4Ghz and a score of 3:11.580sec in Wprime1024m. I dont have a screenshot for either of these results, but they can be found here on www.hwbot.org:

wPrime 32M:

http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=796435

wPrime 1024M:

http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=795600

Also at 4.4Ghz with HT enabled I managed to come in 2nd Place on the CPC benchmarks leaderboard. Just missing out on the top spot by 50 points to dafridge. The MSI board was the first in this benchmark to break 2000 points in the multitasking test!

Conclusion:

After spending many hours with this board over the last week, I can safely say this is the best board that MSI has made to date. Its well built, stable, comes with a wealth of extras and most importantly, Overclocks like a right demon! The support for both Nvidia SLi and ATi Crossfire is an added bonus too.

The Bios is much improved over previous generation stuff, crash recovery now works too! I you wish to use more extreme cooling on this board, Single Stage, Cascade or LN2, there is ample room around the socket area for insulation. My only minor gripe when looking at the CPU area, why did MSI not fit both sets of mounting holes for the last gen 775 HSF? Foxconn have proved this is possible on their latest X58 offering. As I said, only a minor gripe!

More information on this motherboard, or any other board in MSI’s range can be found at the following link:
MSI X58 Eclipse product page

Update: 

The new ver.1.33b bios is showing some improvments, log into our forums to download it. 

Now 32mPi stable at QPI 215×21 for 4.5ghz. Althou only showing 1 thread, it was also fine with 4 cores enabled. Also able to tighten up the memory loads! Fair play MSI bios engineers!

It was a wet and windy Monday morning, marginally warmer than the liquid nitrogen contained within the BOC Cryospeed truck sat outside HEXUS’s studios in north London. Paul “sacha35″ Watkinson and I have just arrived to show HEXUS just what it is that gets us out of bed so early on a Monday morning.   

So we start emptying the car and within 5 minutes, there’s 3-4 grand’s worth of kit sat on a table, ready to be stressed at less than -100C in the hope that we can break some world records. What’s first we think? A cup of tea. So after running things past Nick from HEXUS, we start by setting up the system to show just what it can do under ‘normal’ conditions.

• Intel Core i7 “Nehalem” 965 Extreme CPU 
• Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard 
• Kingston HyperX DDR3-2000 1.65v  
• 2x Asus 4870X2 1GB 
• Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W 

Stock Intel heatsink, 4Ghz, 1.35v. How’d you like them apples?!  

The ease at which this system flew to 4Ghz and happily benched all the tests we wanted was encouraging for what was to follow. After briefly flirting with 4.2Ghz and seeing if it would achieve a 1Ghz overclock on the Intel cooler, we decided that it was time to get down to business. We stripped the system down, and started to set up for some extreme overclocking. 

Firstly, this would require some attention to detail with the motherboard. Despite being one of two Rampage II Extreme’s in the country, and possibly one of the best motherboard’s you’ll see for a Core i7 system, it still won’t run very well covered in water. To stop the condensation we’re going to get from a -100C lump of copper, we needed to insulate the area around the motherboard socket in order to keep it working.  

To do this, Paul used some kneaded eraser, or what’s sometimes called artist’s putty. Combined with some electrical tape to contain the putty, it was pushed in and around the CPU socket in order to fill the void and create an airtight seal so no moisture would develop in the important areas. Patience is the key at this point, rush this bit and you’re likely to need to break down the system and do this again in the middle of your benchmarks or you’ll end up with some rather expensive silicon-based paperweights.  

With the motherboard insulated, Paul started to set up the Kingpin F1 copper CPU pot, designed purely for maximum LN2 overclocking potential. Meanwhile I set about swapping the Kingston DDR3 because we had a special Corsair set up to evaluate. The Kingston set had done very well without any additional cooling, but with Corsair having provided a Nautilus 500 watercooling unit, ready to be hooked up to their new prototype thermo-electric cooling unit, we were excited to see what it could do. The results were pretty spectacular, and the DDR3 modules were overclocked from DDR3-1866 to DDR3-2200 at only 1.75v.

The watercooling enabled the TEC cooler to register 5C on the heatspreaders, causing some potential problems with condensation so this wont be for everyone, but it allowed Paul to push that little bit further.  

This RAM, combined with Paul working his magic to achieve a 5.1Ghz overclock from the Core i7 965 CPU, resulted in what was at the time, the SuperPi 1M World Record and is still the wPrime 32M and 1024M Core i7 World Records. 

HEXUS have got some video coverage of the day, check them out:

The Hardware

On Air

On LN2

Record Breakers!

All in all, this wrapped up a fun day benching in HEXUS’ labs showing them just how we do what we do.