RESURRECTING THE CHAMP AORUS X299 SOC CHAMPION
So here ’ s another one from GIGABYTE , or AORUS if you will . The new generation Champion board which , true to its name , was the board to beat at some point holding 26 Global first places and some world records on HWBOT . A truly impressive feat and one that obviously speaks volumes about the motherboard .
That is all obvious though and we saw the press release , so there ’ s nothing new there nor anything I might add to that . As with all motherboards ( or any other component for that matter ) the truth is where the rubber meets the road and how well it does outside the vendor ’ s labs , in the wild and somewhat inexperienced hands . �
Ultimately , what could this motherboard do with no guidance from seasoned overclockers and a random CPU sample ? Well , that is the entire point of this editorial . Try not think of it as a review ( hence no score or award ) but rather an experience from my perspective on what the motherboard is and isn ' t capable of .
Before I go further , please note that the scores are not great . In fact , they show very low efficiency which has everything to do with the OS , my lack of tuning abilities and using memory that was in no way , shape or form appropriate for what I was doing . These results were not meant to be competitive , but simply trying to find out if it is possible to reach those high frequencies which GIGABYTE had shown off and claimed were possible on their motherboards . After all , just about any frequency is possible on any board under the right conditions . The truth is not everyone buying a motherboard will be an expert overclocker . In fact , there are likely more average to substandard ones than there are great ones , much like in anything else . So as always , this is for the most part a worst case scenario .
Believe it or not , while I was in the middle of this editorial , a long time after having tested the Champion , things changed and it turns out that while this particular model will never or is unlikely to ever see the
“ With the X299 SOC-Champion you ’ re somewhat dealing with a double edged sword .” light of day outside the lab and a few other boards GIGABYTE sent out to overclockers , the model that will end up in retail is actually even better . That ’ s right , there is a retail model which officially supports LN2 overclocking of the 18 core INTEL CPU and has been tested to do as much internally - something that was not officially supported and likely not possible with the original model which this editorial is based on . It is not modesty that has me write that this is a worst case scenario , it literally is as if you ’ re in any way convinced by the Champion you ’ re going to end up with a more capable motherboard than I did when this editorial was written .
Of course we have been here before with the X99 platform where we had something akin to two generations of boards . The first iterations , while adequate , weren ’ t spectacular in any way and it took a second attempt to truly bring out the most from the platform . It was the overclocking SKUs which always arrived later than the mainstream products which laid the foundation for the 2nd generation boards ( at least where GIGABYTE is concerned ). I ’ m confident you ’ ll recall that the X99 SOC-Champion ushered in the Socket switch , which was eventually adopted on all 2nd generation X99 boards from GIGABYTE . All of them were better than their previous counterparts in every possible way ( performance and tuning )
With that in mind and a better version on the horizon , does it mean that these results are invalid ? Of course not . The newer model builds
Issue 42 | 2017 The OverClocker 7