With the market for extreme PC cooling growing at a rapid rate over the past few years, we are seeing a much greater number of PC components and accessories geared to this end of the spectrum.  This goes back to the Foxconn “Quantum Force” line, which was kicked off with a killer mainboard, the BLACKOPS with features that had never been seen before.  Fast forward a few years, and now all the top manufacturers are mimicking elements from that board, and pushing forward with other innovations geared towards extreme cooling enthusiasts.

However, one area that has not seen any special attention is in the TIM (Thermal Interface Material) market, at least until now (the last time there was anything resembling this kind of enthusiast buzz over some cooling goo was when Arctic Silver hit the market). eVGA recently unleashed on the world their new TIM dubbed “Frostbite,” and for good reason.  eVGA claims this new compound is not only better for the extreme cooling crowd, but also superior for everyday users as well.  Not only that, but k|ngp|n himself is signing off on all these claims and endorsing the product for extreme cooling use.

The longtime standard-bearer for extreme cooling has been Arctic Silver’s Céramique, which k|ngp|n and many others have used it for years.  However, over the past year of so, many users have been testing alternatives.  Elmor (a top overclocker from Sweden) swears by OCZ Freeze, and there have been a number of positive reports with several other compounds as well.  Considering all the recent speculation, we needed to take a closer look at this new contender.

Next: eVGA Frostbite, a closer look…

Packaging:

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti SC:

Specifications and Features:

• Free version of 3DMark 11 Advanced Edition included. Users can redeem their code when the product is registered on EVGA.com. This is a $19.99 value. For more information, please visit http://www.evga.com/articles/00594/
• Overclocked out of the box – This card offers a performance increase out of the box, attached is the product spec sheet which includes the details on clockspeeds.
• Special Edition EVGA Precision v2.0.1 – We created a special look of our popular software specifically for the EVGA GTX 560 Ti. This utility allows overclocking, monitoring and fanspeed adjustments. It is located on the DVD that ships with your card. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/precision/
• EVGA OC Scanner – EVGA OC Scanner is fully supported by the EVGA GTX 560 Ti. This utility allows you to benchmark, monitor and stress test your EVGA card. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/ocscanner/
• Voltage Tuning with EVGA ELEET– EVGA ELEET allows voltage tuning on a wide range of EVGA cards, including the GTX 560 Ti. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/eleet/
• EVGA Customer Support – EVGA’s acclaimed customer support can be contacted by support ticket, email, and phone. For more information, please visit  http://www.evga.com/support/
• EVGA Community – Active game servers, thriving forums, integrated chat and social networks allow users to ask questions or get help wherever they feel the most comfortable. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/community/
• EVGA Warranty – EVGA offers a variety of warranties to fit your needs, including our exclusive 10 year Extended Warranty. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/community/
• EVGA Advanced RMA Program – EVGA offers this service to help reduce the downtime of a customer’s system by shipping a replacement product first and lets our valued customer deal with the EVGA directly for quick and efficient service. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/ear/
• EVGA Step-Up Program – EVGA protects your investment for 90 days following your purchase. Qualifying products can be upgraded, one time only, to a select greater performing product. For more information, please visit www.evga.com/stepup/

Next: Test System & Overclocking

Packaging:

Specifications and Features:

The EVGA GTX 570 SC:

Next: Test System and Overclocking

Packaging:

The EVGA GTX 460 FTW:

Specifications and Features:

Next: Test Setup, Overclocking Software, and Overclocking Results

Packaging:

Parts and Manuals:

Specifications:

Water Cooling Parts and Specifications:

GTS140 Radiator:

Swiftech’s new Apogee LP CPU Waterblock:

Swiftech Micro-Res:

EK’s DCP 2.2 pump:

Continue to the next page for the Lian Li PC-Q08 comparison.

Packaging:

The EVGA GTS 450 FTW:

Specifications and Features:

Continue to the next page for target consumers, EVGA software, and overclocking >>

Packaging:

The EVGA 460:

Specifications and Features:

Specifications:

Features:

Continue on to the next page for overclocking and test results…

EVGA P55 Motherboard

The Winner of the March Blogger Giveaway is carpo93!

Congratulations to carpo93, and thank you to EVGA for sponsoring.  Stay tuned for April’s giveaway announcement later on today.

The idea of a low clock challenge is to provide a playing field for benchmarkers to prove their tweaking skills in a given benchmark. Setting specific limitations constructs the playing field and opens the doors to a lot of people to compete that might not have the newest or best hardware that a wide open competition would require. Overclockaholics.com recently had a low clock 3Dmark 01 challenge which locked CPU clocks to 4.2GHz and limited Nature Frames Per Second to 1200FPS for single card or 1400FPS for dual card entries. These two simple limitations really setup an array of possible winning combinations that require tweaking skills at both the software and hardware level.

Needing a bit of a break from pounding my head against the wall with a memory review, I took a couple days to get back in the 3DMark 01 tweaking seat – which hasn’t been sat in for some time – and tried my hand at the Overclockaholics.com 3DMark 01 Low Clock Challenge. Here is my story of how I came to winning the single card category last weekend.

There are two primary platforms that can be competitive in this type of challenge, using an Intel C2D on the 775 platform or the slightly less potent Intel i7 socket 1366 platform. The reason i7 is actually a worse a platform for 3DMark 01 is the fact that the Nature benchmark scores are terrible on the i7 platform at 4.2GHz compared to C2D. You will soon find out that I had plans to take care of that. Essentially though, I had both platforms setup ready to rock but my goal was to be competitive with the i7 platform using whatever means necessary. I began preliminary testing on the Intel i7/X58 platform with phase cooling on the CPU. The need for sub-zero cooling on the CPU will also be explained shortly.

With the GPU on air, it was apparent that being competitive just wasn’t going to be possible. At a minimum, 90K was going to be required to win this thing, at this point in the weekend, I think the top score posted for single card was around 89.5K already. Even with the CPU under sub-zero conditions allowing for a very nice uncore clock – which helps 01 scores tremendously – the Nature FPS were just too low to compete. That is when the big guns were brought out to help the little GTX260 play with the C2D boys.

A little rubber eraser, 1 KingpinCooling.com Tek9 4.0 Slim, a 50K ohm variable resistor, a couple shop towels, and this setup was ready to rock 01’s world. The variable resistor was the only mod done to the card which was done to bypass OCP. Other than that, this is just a straight up Gigabyte GTX260 216SP video card. Here is a complete list of the hardware used for the rest of the competition.

Over the course of two six hour sessions, this system was beaten, abused, and downright throttled. The GTX260 nicely surprised me willing to run through Nature at -140C. Normally these GPU’s will cold bug well before that without a special BIOS so either these cards had that special BIOS, or this card is just a freak of nature. Either way, the GPU clocks definitely helped the score and took the single card results for the competition to the next level. Here are a couple photos of the two bench sessions.

Most of the benching was done with the GPU at -120C and the CPU at -30C ~ -35C. The digital multi-meter is showing the resistance across the OCP mod which I set to 13.33K Ω. This allowed GPU voltage of 1.25v to be used at clocks in excess of 1000MHz. For the suite of benchmarks, GPU clocks were set to 1026MHz with shaders running at 2052MHz. The GPU memory clocks were most stable at 1215MHz but could creep close to 1300MHz. For Nature however, the GPU clocks were set as they are in the screen shot below, 1080/2160/1215. Here is the screen shot of my best – and winning – single card result.

Obviously this isn’t even the best this setup could pull off at 4.2GHz because Nature is far from maxed out. If I could get GPU clocks high enough to hit the 1200FPS limit in Nature, the overall score would have been at least 92K. Either way it didn’t matter as this was enough to win the competition and take home a very much needed KingpinCooling.com F1 EE CPU pot. I have been benching with a MMouse Rev3 CU pot for so long that the upgrade to one with more mass is guaranteed to help with multi-threaded benchmarks like Vantage and 06 with the i7 processors. To wrap things up, here are a couple photos of the setup during tear down. Plenty of snow was produced during the bench session, nothing like winter in July.

I would like to thank Overclockaholics.com for a great contest, the rest of the competitors for pushing me to go LN2 on the GPU, and KingpinCooling.com for the prize. All I can say is that this card is far from done.

A recent forum post out there in the middle of the Australian portion of the internet – AKA i4memory.com – led me to investigate the performance impact of a BIOS option on the EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified. The option labeled ‘MCH Strap’ would indicate that it changes the latencies of the MCH, like on previous Intel chipsets such as the P965, P35, X48 and so on. The only catch is that the Intel X58 chipset, does not have an MCH (Memory Controller Hub). The Intel X58 chipset is no longer responsible for the memory controller as Intel Core i7 processors now have a integrated memory controller – or IMC – on the CPU die.

This inherent difference in design of the chipset got me thinking, if there is no MCH, what is this setting actually changing? Apparently others were thinking the same thing as the question popped up in the i4memory.com forums. Needless to say, I took it upon myself to have a quick look, which you are reading right now…this very second, here at TechReaction.net.

Before we have a look at the testing, let’s go over the complete setup used for the testing, and discuss a little bit more about exactly what I am testing today, and why. First a couple photos of the setup followed by the list of hardware used.

This is primarily for Classified owners so I am just going to assume you are all familiar with the BIOS. On the main overclocking settings page is the option for the ‘MCH Strap’. There are a number of settings which are 2133, 1867, 1600, 1333, 1067, 800, AUTO, DRAM Ratio. On previous Intel chipsets, the MCH strap was responsible for various hidden chipset latency timings and a lower MCH strap would increase performance of the chipset, and subsequent memory subsystem. When adjusting the ‘MCH Strap’ setting on the Classified, the only visible changes are those to the memory sub-timings. A lower strap would result in tighter memory sub-timings. A higher strap setting and the sub-timings on the memory would loosen. Pretty straight forward…right?

One would assume so, but no one was sure in the i4memory.com forum discussion so I did this basic testing to see if there was anything being changed behind the scenes that we couldn’t see. The basic methodology is pretty straight forward. Set a high ‘MCH Strap’, then measure the systems performance and note the sub-timings. Set a low ‘MCH Strap’, then measure its performance the same way and also note the memory sub-timings that strap sets. Then simply set the higher ‘MCH Strap’ again, but this time manually adjust the memory sub-timings to that which the lower ‘MCH Strap’ set. If the performance is the same as the performance of the lower ‘MCH Strap’ setting, then we know there is nothing else going on that we can’t see.

I set the system up as outlined above. I decided on stock settings with the 2:12 memory ratio for no apparent reason really, I simply wanted to ensure I would have the ability to select a couple different ‘MCH Strap’ options. As it turns out, at these settings, the 1600 through to the 1067 ‘MCH Strap’ selection were the only ones available. That is why I only have results from those three straps. I also ran the AUTO option just to see what it would select. I used the Everest Ultimate and ScienceMark bandwidth test as well as a run of SPi 32M as that is the best way to see if any memory sub-system gains are had. I think that about covers the necessary details, so I’ll stop yapping and you can look at the results.

The results may appear almost identical but if we look close at the SPi times, there is a definite pattern there. From the higher ‘MCH Strap’ setting down to the lowest, we see the SPi time drop. This means we definitely have SPi gains from the lower ‘MCH Strap’ selections but that is primarily from the tighter memory sub-timings. Looking at the last result we can see that with the 1600 ‘MCH Strap’ selected and the sub-timings tightened manually to reflect the 1067 ‘MCH Strap’ selection, the result is the same time as the 1333 ‘MCH Strap’ selection. Considering there is only a 12 one-hundredths of a second difference between the 1067 and the 1333 ‘MCH Strap’ selection, I am going to conclude that the ‘MCH Strap’ option in the EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified BIOS is definitely just adjusting sub-timings and nothing more.

Obviously this wasn’t an exercise in exhaustive testing and I didn’t include any 3D testing but all indications of this setting were that it simply tightened and loosened the memory sub-timings. There is no reason to test 3D performance in my mind. Here is a full chart of all three runs of each setting, there was a reboot between each run.

To finish up I have included a sample from each ‘MCH Setting’ that was tested so you can see the memory sub-timings differences. If there are any further questions about this quick test, don’t hesitate to post a comment and I will do my best to answer. Thanks for reading.