Review: MSI P35 Neo2-FR Under Cascade
01.13.08 - 04:03pm
Yesterday I had the chance to test this motherboard under some sub-ambient cooling and I was blown away. I’ve got a high-end board arriving later this week so I figured I’d go out in the garage and check up on the cascade and tune it for the Q6600. After a slight delay in which I had to repair a small leak on the suction-line, I vacuumed down the second stage and put a rough 50/50 charge of propane and carbon dioxide into the system and fired it up. Rather than test on a load-tester, I dragged out the Neo2-FR, Q6600, Firestix, and fired the system up. This was more of a cascade test rather than hardware test but the results were great. The cascade idled around -70C, loaded around -60C, and only drooped under -60C while running wPrime1024m which utilizes all four cores.
In the BIOS I simply threw 1.65vcore and pushed the northbridge and FSB voltages to the limits and booted straight up at 4500MHz. One thing to note, to break 505FSB I had to manually shift the jumpers on the board to shift from the 1066 strap to the 1333 strap, which loosens up the northbridge timings. I’ve only got screenshots of 4605MHz which was wPrime32M and SuperPi1M stable but the system was able to boot from BIOS at 520FSB for 4680MHz and the bumped up to 523FSB for a max clockspeed of 4707MHz. I’m certain I’ll revisit this board in two weeks when I receive a cylinder of ethane which should lead to -80C load temperatures and possibly 4700MHz bench-stable and 4800MHz to 4900MHz screenshot stable. Here’s a few of the screenshots I snapped during the quick test, for the air-cooled results please view the entire review. I believe the best part though was my kill-a-watt beeping when I pulled 1800+watts from the wall during the wPrime1024M test, 1400w for the cascade and 400w for the computer. If you want to see more screenshots, they can all be viewed here.
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