Let’s finally take a look at how the board was tested and our initial results. The test setup is made up from an array of modern parts from some top manufacturers:

CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo)
Motherboards
-ASRock 990FX Professional
-Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7
Memory Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB Dual Channel), 1866MHz @ 9-10-9-24
CPU Cooler Corsair Hydro Series H70
Graphics ZOTAC GeForce GTX 570 AMP! Edition
PSU Corsair HX650W
Storage
Corsair Force Series F120 120GB SSD (Sandforce 1200)
LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray and HD-DVD ROM Drive
Case Cooler Master Lab Test Bench V1.0

Overclocking

The AMD 1100T has an unlocked multiplier, which makes overclocking the CPU as easy as increasing the multiplier and voltage and seeing how far you can go. However, we found that overclocking with the 990FX Professional was not as easy as one could hope. Bumping up the multiplier and frequency to 3.9GHz (19.5x200) was fairly simple, with only a small increase in Vcore needed to gain stability at 1.40V.




Despite our best efforts, the overclock could not easily be taken further. 4GHz on the same voltages was not stable, and any increases in Vcore or CPU-NB presented with lockups of the system and the base clock could also not be taken further and remain stable. The system was bootable up to 4.2GHz, but was not stable under our stress testing. It was also noted that the CPU power phases made a whistling or whining noise under load that was not heard with other boards tested so far. In addition to this, temperature readings from the BIOS differed wildly to the F-Stream software, which both differed from 3rd party programs. Such programs seem not to be able to get accurate readings at all for the AMD CPU, but instead only the ‘Core’ temperature, which is calibrated slightly differently, giving incorrect idle figures. Hopefully some of the issues here can be rectified with a BIOS update, and also AMD may have decided to drastically improve the temperature sensors in the new FX CPUs.