I had a couple of issues that bugged me about my EVGA Z68 SLI. One was a weird SATA issue where drives would disappear from Windows. This caused some major headaches a while back and was fixed simply by swapping SATA ports. And while it was fixed for the time being, it made me wary of any upgrades that would require another SATA port.
But the bigger issue was the SLI itself. Remember when PhysX cards were a thing? Apparently EVGA did; the board was designed for two SLI cards (8x/8x) and an extra PhysX card in a PCI 4x slot. PhysX cards never took off (thankfully), but the board was left with a design oddity: two PCI-E slots sandwiched a single slot apart. This means that when you’re running two dual-slot video cards (which most are), they’re right next to each other. As you might imagine, this makes heat an issue — especially for the top card:
Running Furmark, the top card would run some 20-30° hotter than the bottom one, getting well past 90° — not the temperature a GTX 770 is meant for.
The upgrade path
I ran into a problem, though. The 1155 motherboards have been phased out; the current socket is 1150, with the new Intel Haswell chips. If I bought a new 1150 board, I’d have to buy a new processor as well. Well, nuts to that — my ‘old’ Sandy Bridge is still giving me more than enough headroom, and overclocks like a champ. Funny thing, though. Just last year, the ASUS RoG Maximus V Formula Z77 was a high-end ($300) board for anyone wanting a high-end Ivy Bridge platform. I found a refurbished one on NewEgg last week for $120. It’s amazing how fast a top-end setup becomes yesterday’s news.
The board is geared toward serious overclocking, and the BIOS reflects that. There’s more than I can really wrap my head around at the moment; suffice to say my Core i5 is comfortable at 4.1ghz, and I haven’t tried to push the platform yet. Nicely though, the PCI-E slots have an extra slot between them. Such a seemingly minor design change drops the temperatures on my top GPU by a good 15°, which makes me feel a lot better about overclocking it. The board also has much better onboard audio than the EVGA, and quite a few more overclocking features including power and reset buttons on the board itself (always a welcome detail). There’s even some totally gratuitous red backlighting on the left:
I took the opportunity to clean up my rig, literally. I dusted it, rearranged the hard drive cages, and reorganized the cable routing to make things nice and tidy. Forgive the lousy picture quality — I’ll have to snap some more during the day. I gotta say though, with the custom full-sized window I scored from MNPCTech, I’m really digging the Corsair 600T. The only addition I can foresee is possibly a very thin layer of sound-damping foam for the back panel. Technically I’d say it’s for sound damping (duh), but really it’s because part of the back panel is visible and its white paint throws off the stealth-black aesthetic. First-world problems, man.
So, there you have it. A minor upgrade if there ever was one, but hey… I paid $120 for a $300 motherboard. I’ll take it.
PC Gaming Are Yes! 