In this post, I will summarize my recent overclocking experiences with the Jingsha X99E Max DDR3 version, and some other findings. In short, I cannot recommend this board. There are too many odd problems, where poor RAM compatibility was the biggest issue. But first some background. I set out to find a motherboard with 8 DDR3 slots, intending to re-use 4G RAM sticks from old 2nd to 4th gen Intel systems, and still have 32G in total. I found three different boards:
- Jingsha X99 V1.0 (X99-8D3)
- Huananzhi X99-T8: Old version ; New version
- Jingsha X99E Max
Since I prefer MATX for more compact computers, I gave the X99E Max a try. The biggest problem with this board was indeed RAM compatability:
- It does not boot with any dual rank Udimm (Non-ECC)
- It is very picky with single rank Udimm. Getting it to recognize all RAM was hard. And when I finally got 32G up and running, performance was abysmal. The third and forth channel simply does not behave well. I could not find any workaround.
- However, it does with perfectly fine with typical dual rank (2R4 and 2R8) Server ECC RAM
The end result of all this testing became rather simple:
- I did not have enough single rank Udimms that worked well on this board, performance just tanked
- So after verifying that ECC RAM worked well, I just bought four sticks of 8G. Which really, really defeats the purpose of this board entirely. Could have just bought a normal X99-XD3 instead with 4 RAM slots and be done.
But with that said, I managed to get down to 1866 CL8, which offers very decent latency (got down to ~68ns in Aida64). This is since I bought DDR3L (1.35V) but forced it to operate at 1.5V. And I also verified that my modded BIOS gives WHEA errors when overclocking ECC RAM too hard. @Mir_Computers FYI
Finally I found some old but quite interesting information. In the earlier DDR3 boards, it was possible to run DDR3 at 2133 MHz
- Video 1 ; Video 2 ; Page 1 ; Page 2
- In particular from the discussions for Video 2, the following Huananzhi boards are mentioned explicitly: TF ; TF-Q ; QD3 ; T8
- I might just have a look and see if I can transplant the right file(s) to get this functionality in my modded BIOS. I do think RAM will still be very expensive for some more years.