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Overclocking

The MSI Eclipse X58 is a great overclocker.

All I had to do in the end is make sure that the memory was happy, and the LED2 display was very helpful in showing where (usually DDR) the system was hanging during post.

To get to the maximum stable overclock, 4.095GHz, all I had to do was:

• Set the memory multiplier to "3" (actually 6)
• Set memory timing to 7-7-7-20-1T
• Fix PCI at 37.3MHz
• disable spread spectrum
• Enable EIST
• disable C-state
• Enable "Turbo" boost
• set base clock to 195MHz
• set QPI to Full-Speed
• leave it at 4.8GT
• use a Noctua NH-U12P with their new Socket 1366 adapter

I did not have to change the voltages at all!

The maximum temperature I observed under PovRAY was 89'C, and the Vcore was at 1.448V

I was very pleased, as the DX58SO was only able to handle a 174MHz FSB with this same Core i7 920 processor.

Power Consumption

Interesting - the MSI Eclipse X58 is a bit more power efficient than the DX58SO, and that's even without their GreenPower Genie!

Conclusion

The MSI Eclipse X58 is one nice motherboard.

It overclocks very well, has a ton of SATA and USB ports - not to mention three PCIe GPU slots that support not only CrossFire, but also SLI!

The memory performance is excellent, and I really like the LED2 on the motherboard along with the switches for power, reset and LED information. The dip switches for overclocking did not turn out to be useful, but they don't hurt in any case. The inclusion of a Creative Labs X-Fi sound card is in my opinion far superior to using a "standard" audio codec - the board just feels, looks and behaves like a quality board.

I was even able to boot into Windows XP at 4.2GHz, however it blue screened almost immediately... but I would not be at all surprised if it could be stabilized with extreme cooling and more Vcore at even higher core speeds.