F E A T U R E // I N T E L C O R E I 9 7 9 8 0 X E & I 7 8 7 0 0 K V S . R O G A P E X F A M I LY
one vendor has in total. Claiming
all the records on day of release is
one thing, as that can literally be
achieved with a single board and
one special CPU. The impressive
part is achieving these astronomical
scores with a board that is readily
available in just about every region.
It is a testament to not only the trust
people have in ROG boards, but
the legacy of the APEX products,
and of course the Rampage se ries
has traditionally been the go to
board for HEDT motherboards and
overclockers.
It may seem as if I am swooning
over the motherboard (and perhaps
I am), but the numbers don’t lie, and
from the results I recorded I’m more
than convinced of this motherboard
and CPU being the winning
combination of this generation.
Overclocking the Core i9-7980XE
was always going to be tricky, not
because of some fundamental flaw
in the CPU, no - it’s simply because,
as mentioned earlier, it is capable
of drawing an incredible amount of
power, and subsequently outputs
an equally gargantuan amount of
heat. To that end, one is going to
need a fairly beefy cooler, and for
those like I who would overclock
this with liquid nitrogen, a specially
designed container which is capable
of handling the load is mandatory.
There isn’t such a container
commercially available, but you
could consider dropping the people
of Der8auer.com an e-mail to see
what they have available for you.
Needless to say, any attempt to
overclock the Intel Core i9-7980XE
Extreme Edition without first de-
lidding the CPU is likely to end
quickly and without much success.
This isn’t new information, but
remains as important if not more so
for such a CPU, and once again you’ll
need a de-lidding tool which is also
available at Der8auer.com
With all that covered, the important
thing as always for me is to prove
that the claimed possibilities and
scores are attainable by anyone with
some knowhow and not just those
within the ROG labs. Basically, the
proof is where the rubber hits the
road. While not all CPUs will behave
in the same manner and certainly
would not have the same limits, it’s
important to realise that regardless
of your skill level (or lack thereof) it’s
quite hard to not deliver impressive
scores with this CPU and the
motherboard.
If only overclocking for points
on HWBOT or positioning even on
Futuremark’s Hall of Fame, there
are plenty of points and positions to
be gained by simply relying on this
combination of hardware. Even with
my lack of tuning ability (or laziness
if you prefer) I was still able to
produce some worthwhile scores as
you can see in the screenshots.
It has to be said that, like all
things, perfection simply doesn’t
exist. It is always worth pursuing,
though. Any issue that you may have
with the Rampage VI APEX is likely
something that can be diagnosed
and worked around with all the
available software and literature.
For instance, losing a memory
channel, getting odd performance
or less than expected performance
scaling are things one can remedy
themselves and is not a reflection of
the motherboard or the CPU. Even
if it is, it’s called overclocking and
these things are to be expected.
Mind you, I didn’t’ experience any of
that. The CBR15 score is low purely
because of my own doing and lack
of any form of tuning, as one could
Core i9 7980XE
@ 5,608MHZ
20 The OverClocker Issue 43 | 2018