Multicore Enhancement / Acceleration options

[Headfoot]

I'm putting together a modest upgrade for my brother for his birthday. I have an i5 2400 laying around and 8gb of ddr3-1333 + a Hyper 212 Evo to accompany it. It was originally in a p67 board but that died on me recently and is out of warranty. The original user of that computer decided to upgrade to z87.

I'll be replacing my brother's q9400 C2Q with this. Given that I have to get a new board either way, I want to get a z77 board with Multicore Enhancement / Acceleration or whatever Gigabyte calls the feature (I can't determine) so I can run the i5 2400 at its top turbo bin for a poor man's overclock on it.

I've been having a great deal of trouble sifting through which boards have the feature, particularly on the Gigabyte boards. I am not looking to spend a ton of cash given that this is a leftover parts frankenputer, but I'd be willing to pay more to get Gigabyte or anyone other than Asus. I will only choose ASUS as the last resort as they have screwed me over on multiple occasions and I do not want to give them my business.

Anyone know of a good and reasonably priced non-Asus z77 board with Multicore Enhancement / Acceleration? (Edit: If I can get to my 3.8 Ghz overclock via max turbo bins on something less than z77 that is acceptable too. I just want to get my max poor man's overclock out of that i5 2400)

 

[Headfoot]

Update: the only one I've been able to nail down as having the feature and still being available to purchase is this one on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128541 (GA-z77M-D3H). Does anyone have this board or know if it can in fact run top turbo bin on all 4 cores?

It seems that if I want to be sure I might have to go back on my anti-ASUS stance :/

 

[crashtech]

I have the Z77-DS3H, but no locked i5 to test. But it's not even quite the same, so I'm no help at all. :/

 

[Headfoot]

Yeah it makes it really difficult to verify when Gigabyte doesnt even have an official name for their version of the feature

 

[Ketchup]

This page might help:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhancement-the-debate-about-free-mhz

 

[Headfoot]

Thanks for the link, that's where I found that one Gigabyte board linked earlier. That's the only resource I've been able to find across the web that vouches for that board having the MCE-like feature. I trust Ian and all but things can change BIOS wise and I want to make sure, if possible. I realize I might have to just go with his word as asking about that particular board is really a pretty specific question

 

[Ketchup]

Gotcha, I am pulling back the manual now. I'll try to look at it when I get to the house and see if I can find any clues.

 

[Ketchup]

The way I read it, and looking at the BIOS options (I was looking at the z77x-ud5h) enabling XMP will allow this to work.

 

[coffeejunkee]

It seems Gigabyte doesn't have a separate bios setting for this but you should be able to overclock anyway. The non-K models still get their 4 extra turbo bins on Z77 so just set the multipliers to the desired frequency.

 

[Headfoot]

Ketchup: thanks for looking through the manual for me, that's a great help. You rock!

Coffeejunkee: its true that you can go for the 4 extra turbo bins any way you slice it, but I'm wondering if that locks all cores at the top turbo bin, instead of stepping down as more cores come online as is the default behavior.

Update: it appears MSI calls their version of this feature "Enhanced Turbo."
Update 2: Thanks for your help everyone, but every mobo I could find with the feature was double the price of other similar mobos. I just couldn't say no to Asrocks Z75 Pro3 for $66

 

[coffeejunkee]

Coffeejunkee: its true that you can go for the 4 extra turbo bins any way you slice it, but I'm wondering if that locks all cores at the top turbo bin, instead of stepping down as more cores come online as is the default behavior.

If you increase all multipliers by 4 bins that's what would happen yes. But what I mean is that you can set the 4/3/2-thread multipliers to the same value as the 1-thread multiplier. That way you get your own self-made MCE without any cores clocking down. It wouldn't work with a cpu that has more than 4 bins difference between lowest and highest multi but with an i5 2400 it should work fine.