Then monitoring rest of voltages
Main power supply rails monitoring:
+3.3, +5, +12V, measured on 24-pin ATX input power connector. Monitoring accuracy is okay for general use,
deviation is near +1%.
Rest system voltages working similar, with 1-2% accuracy. Could be better, but still these values are okay for
most users who are interested to see accurate voltages.
CPU PLL
DRAM Voltage
PCH Voltage
PCH PLL Voltage
CPU VIO voltage
System Agent voltage
Gigabyte board does not provide complete monitoring for user, so I'll just show BIOS settings and measured applied voltages.
BIOS settings:
DRAM Voltage
VIO Voltage
System Agent voltage
Tier 2 : Overclocking Sandy Bridge
Lets check some BCLK clocking with reduced VCC to 1.45v and multi set to 48.
Tier 3 : Power stress test (thermals)
Maximus IV Extreme off, just on standby power, with CPU heatsink installed. NEC USB Bridge and peripheral controllers
heat up to mid-40's Celsius.
Power on at 5.17GHz 1.5V. System begin to heat up. wPrime 32M started
Thermal. With almost 5.2GHz Sandy Bridge quad core, heatsink on VRM module was in range 45 to 60C without any air-cooling
except stock low-speed fan on Scythe cooler.
DC-DC convertor for USB 3.0 controllers run quite warm, above +60 C. This was always
the hottest point on motherboard during any tests and benchmarks.
VDIMM power supply is dead cold, only +44. Maximum I saw during 2hrs of test - is 47 here.
IDT PCI-Express clock buffer near +50C, just 20 degrees about ambient.
PCH runs near +50C, without any active airflow.
PLX switch working at +50-55C. Nothing except 8600GT card installed.
Super I/O area is cool, just a small chip which drives power-hungry LEDs in debug indicator heating up a bit.
NF200 bridge totally unpowered when not used. It's temperature is same as PCB, no heat at all.
I was also interested in thermals without heatsink onboard, so decreased clock to 4.5GHz and voltage to 1.35V,
just to be safe.
Idle - 50-55c for drivers, even less for mosfets. MOSFETs on center was covered with matte paste, to
get rid from metal can reflectivity. Thermal imager accurate only on non-reflective surfaces.
Coils run near 40-45C with 4.5GHz tests.
Drivers produced most part of heat, running near +60C.
Noise and transient testing
ASUS Vcore probe connect
Shield of probe was connected to ground terminal to nearest capacitor in CPU cavity on back of motherboard, signal is VCCP terminal. For each tests below CPU was overclocked to 5.15GHz with 1.500 Vcore BIOS setting.
OS booted, system idle. 10-15mV range small noise, totally acceptable.
Light, SuperPI loading to CPU, noise increased to ~20mV, not noticeable actually.
Small spike at running frequency of VRM, 500 kHz, observed.
WPriming at 8 threads shows some increased ripple, 60-70mV max. It's okay for CPU.
wPrime at 5GHz and 1024 test (clock is limited by thermals with air-cooling), 65-75mV range. Okay too.
During Vantage CPU test VCCP is surprisingly clean, only ~30mV pk-pk ripple.
3Dmark03 test Nature, with 8600GT card on stock clocks. below 30mV range noise.
3Dmark03 test, with 480GTX on stock clocks. Never saw above 90mV.
In conclusion for CPU VRM on Maximus IV Extreme - it doing job very good. Run hotter than Gigabyte monster, but power quality is clearly better.
Overall YouTube video with M4E under noise tests:
Youtube demo during ASUS VRM testing
Gigabyte Vcore probe connect
Idle, booted OS, nothing loads system
Quite and safe.
Light load with 5.17GHz 1.5V in BIOS, LLC lvl 1.
Some 250kHz low-amplitude noise. About 10mV peak-peak.
3D06 run thru CPU tests.
Whole bunch of oscillations happen. Average peak-peak level is 30-70mV
..with frequencies 22, 900Hz, few kHz.
With medium to high-loads there are slow and big transients. 100-115mV peak-peak.
1MHz PWM1 signal added.
SuperPI 1M
