Normally when a new chipset hits the market we like to try and get a motherboard from one of the major companies for use in our reviews and initial testing. This goes for any new CPU regardless of if it is AMD or Intel. The reasons are pretty simple; the first is that realistically not that many people but Intel reference products. You get some that will, but the majority are going to buy from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI or one of the other players. This is not saying that Intel boards are not good products; it is just that most consumers have their favorite brands. However we wanted to try things a little differently with the launch of the X79 chipset. We have decided to take a first look at Intel’s reference motherboard and see how well it performs. As with everything we do there are multiple reasons for this. One is we want to see how Intel’s implementation of three-way SLI using the CPU for all PCIe lanes works and we also wanted to see what the overclocking envelope turns out to be. This will give us a great baseline for the reviews of other X79 motherboards in the weeks ahead. So with all that out of the way lets dive into Intel’s X79SI Siler (insert Heroes Reference here).
BIOS -BIOS is an acronym that stands for Basic Input/Output System. It is meant to control your product at a very low level. As of right now there are three regularly used BIOS formats (there are actually more than that but there are three common ones). These are the AMI (American Megatrends Incorporated), Award, and Phoenix.
The BIOS on the Intel X79SI is clean and simple. The options that are provided are meant for ease of use. In the performance section we find a new item for Intel. This is an Overclocking Assistant. This is not really all that different from the same ones that you find on Asus or ASRock boards. It is a simple way to give you a boost. The settings here are very conservative though and did not really offer that much in the way of performance.
The rest of the BIOS is clean and gives you the usual choices you would find in any other BIOS.Overclocking -Like we told you in our coverage of the 3960X CPU the new motherboard CPU combination is very easy to overclock. They have added in even more features to help you get a higher clock as well (which we just showed you in the BIOS). However, we found that using the overclocking assistant might get some nice numbers we did not see the performance materialize. We did get past using this and ended up with the overclock we showed you in the full review of the 3960X of 4.5GHz (45x100 BCLK). Of course overclocking is a picky subject. I can buy to identical CPUs from the store and they will not always perform the same way under stress. This is the same with motherboards, RAM and GPUs. So again it is important to keep in mind that our results represent a specific hardware configuration. Yours may be similar but will rarely be identical.Overclocking Tools -Intel did provide a couple of tools for overclocking, but while they look very nice they were not exactly in the same class as ones from Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock or others. Still if you are looking for a quick Windows based OC then they will do the job.
