“With the Champion, you’re
looking at a product that is by
all means a culmination of what
the company is capable of...”
In fact, the approach I used was
to get the scores first, then tweak
them higher via the Mesh frequency
as it can have an unpredictable
effect on maximum memory
frequency etc. So, being the person
I am, I’d rather isolate the different
parts of the system, rather than
hope that the memory runs well
enough in tandem with a high Mesh
frequency.
That aside, the Champion
perhaps in line with the previous
X99 board has some difficulty
with 1T command rate is used.
This ultimately won’t make much
of a difference in the newer
benchmarks, but for those still
running the older ones this can
have huge implications and you
10 The OverClocker Issue 42 | 2017
may have to compensate for it in
other ways. For instance, running
1T reliably over 3,733MHz may
prove troublesome, but with enough
manual tuning you probably could.
I had neither the time nor skill to
achieve this, but have seen others
do it so I know it is possible. I
settled on 2T and tried to optimize
somewhere else for performance.
When it comes to the standard
XOC C12 or C11 4000MHz runs,
the Champion may not be able to
achieve this either, but that was with
the X11X BIOS and older. The newer
versions and the newer board are
likely to have this sorted, but this
was my experience with the original
board. Much like with the command
rate, but perhaps more pronounced,
you’ll have to find the performance
somewhere else, or simply
settle for more relaxed primary
timings and tighten the secondary
and tertiary timings even more.
Whatever your solution, it is clear
that you can compensate for these
as shown by the massive number of
global first place benchmark results
that this motherboard achieved.
Ultimately, while these could be
limiting, you have to realize that
you’d actually have to test efficiency
before assuming that you’re losing
it compared to another board which
can do all this with relative ease.
There’s a lot to board performance
and, as you may know, the CPU
sample plays a huge role in where
a board places itself in the rankings
and what scores are achieved. On
paper there may be a clear and
better board, but in practice and
when you count the results at
any given time, you may find the
opposite is true or not so clear. So
once again, you have to decide what
matric you’re using and realize
that no board is going to magically
generate efficient scores for you at
this level because you have to tune
that yourself.
During the initial run with the