as well it takes away from
the sense of achievement,
discovery or excitement of
overclocking the K SKU CPUs,
but that couldn’t be farther
from the truth.
One of the things that
make overclocking hard is
that you may spend a bit of
time getting familiar with a
motherboard under regular
AIO conditions. However,
a lot of the knowledge and
discoveries you make in
this testing environment aren't
applicable in the same way
even at a fair -50’C. The CPU
behaves differently, the
memory as well, but with
the APEX you are somewhat
guided as to what you should
be experiencing and what to
look out for in case you come
across an issue.
As stated initially, CPUs
will vary and the one I had
at my disposal for this piece
peaked out at about 6.4GHz.
Naturally one could have
tried to turn of HT, some cores
etc. and focus on the 2D
benchmarks, but the fact that
we did manage some scores
at 6.4GHz was already
enough to drive the point
home of just how good the
APEX is. The frequency is low
of course, but that has
everything to do with the
particular CPU and not the
motherboard.
A lot of what made the APEX
worth freezing again and in
fact writing this entire editorial
is just how simple and straight
forward it was to overclock.
The options within the UEFI
are plenty as you can
imagine. There’s nothing out
there that matches what the
ROG boards have under
Tweakers Paradise and some
other sub menus. The options
may even exist on competing
boards, but they are not this
readily identifiable and well
explained. With the APEX
board you’re always in control
and you’re working towards a
tangible goal. Even when you
seek help from fellow
overclockers it is rather easy to
communicate what the issue is
or at least just
via your settings that are not
necessarily exposed on other
high end boards, you can find
your way.
20 The OverClocker Issue 41 | 2017
The RSVD switch which
is used for mitigating the
notorious cold boot bug,
works pretty well. With this
CPU there were temperatures
that were just too low
and the board would not
post at -190’C (container
temperature), however the CPU
could operate just fine at this
temperature.
In as far as the UEFI updates
go, there were a few and
we went through a number of
them for this editorial. Some
are obviously great and others
not so much, but for the most
part none of them will have
you believe that the board is
anything but solid. Eventually
we settled on a couple
including the official 0906
update which was butter
smooth for LN2 overclocking.
What you’ll notice in the
shots is that the CPU-Z tabs
has a different BIOS string
than what we stated, but
that has everything to do
with the dead SAMSUNG
XP941 M.2 drive which
had every single screenshot
that was saved during the
week of overclocking this
on this motherboard. So the
screenshots are the ones that
w ere saved somehow and a
previous one from the more
regular air review when a
brief LN2 session was in
order.
I’m well aware of the X299
based APEX board and this
one may not seem attractive
to some. However, if you
have a good 7700K or
7600K or simply are not
going to be buying anything
new, this is still a great
board and one that you
should seriously consider for
the 7th gen CPUs. If you run
benchmarks for points, there
are plenty of points to be
had from running an APEX
and a 7700K for instance,