Asrock X79 extreme9 overclocking problem

[BrightCandle]

Bios: 3.60 - installed this yesterday and now the following is happening.

Setting the overclock simply as:
Core Current 300
Leaving it on dynamic voltage
Multiplier set to 44
Everything else auto/defaults except an XMP profile for RAM.

When running Linx with 6-12 threads after a few seconds the multiplier will drop to 35. When running Linx with 4 threads it will maintain 43-44 multiplier. With a single thread it will maintain 44 all the time.

It looks to me like the current limit is being hit, but the maximum for the value is 511 and that doesn't seem to change a thing, nor does setting it to 100.

Temperature of the CPU in all testing has never exceeded 55C, its well and truly cooled sufficiently.

Any idea what the problem might be? I have tried a bundle of things like turning off speedstep and turbo boost and messing with the short and long duration currents and durations and I haven't made any real difference. Is there a tool that can tell me why its throttling down perhaps?

 

[AdamK47]

I highly doubt you are hitting the current limit. When I had my 3960X @ 4.5GHz with 1.325V at load, it would hit the current limit at 200. Bumped it to 225 and never hit it with the CPU maxed using LinX AVX. Of course this is with an Extreme11 and not an Extreme9, but I'm sure ASRocks measurements are the same. Right now I have my IB-E 4960X at 4.5GHz with 1.40V at load and it never hits the current limit. This is with the default 200 at full load using LinX AVX.

I'm old school and never use auto voltage on any motherboard I buy. Set it manually with what you think it needs and test. Go higher or lower based on the results of your tests. You'll get a better understanding of what your CPU needs to be stable at a given clock speed.

 

[BrightCandle]

So I have done some more testing and the results are as follows, if I set the Core Current to the following values I see different clock speeds:

50 - can't ever reach 4400, hovers around 2200 on idle and drops to 1600 on Linx 12 threads
100 - Single CPU is a little over 3000 and drops to 2200 on load
511 - maximum setting- 4400 on single core, 3500 on 12 threads

So yes I think its a current protection issue, I think someone at Asrock screwed up and the numbers are being translated wrongly. I have raised a support ticket, because its clear there is a problem in these bios with overclocking.

Even the description in Asrock's manual is completely wrong, it says the Core Current Limit "Use this item to add voltage when the CPU is in Turbo mode".

I tried setting the bclk to 125 for strap access with lowered multiplier and it refused to boot. These new bios are not overclocking well so far!

 

[BrightCandle]

Confirmation from Asrock its a bug in their 3.60 bios. Its fixed in the L3.61 beta driver.