Overclocking the GA-X79-UP4 w/Ivy Bridge-E

[cchalogamer]

Skip to the Bold if you want to see my actual reason for posting.

 

As some of you may know a while back I acquired an Ivy Bridge-E setup, and probably less know that I had some big issues come up with a puppy my fiancee fell in love with come up.  Well it's been poor mode around here for the last couple months and seeing as I literally installed the 4930K, board etc. The week I found out about the puppy's issues I never got a chance to play with it. 

 

Well the dog has had surgery (thankfully for much less than orig quoted by a vet in Bedford VA, hit me up if you're in the area and need a recommendation), he has some hair back and I started trying to figure out the beast that is Ivy-E.  Now I've OCed a fair number of Ivy Bridge CPUs, several Haswell  and even a few Sandy Bridge, and while I thought my pains with my 4770K were bad trying to get it stable over 4.4 without resorting to custom watercooling it wasn't as bad as the work that's gotten me here:

 

http://valid.canardpc.com/2qumj4

 

 

btw, it's actually set to ~1.3V in BIOS with dynamic voltage, CPUZ just captured it wrong at the time of the validation

 

Now overall this has been an easy CPU to get to this speed considering the horror stories I've read about this board.  The X79-UP4 for a LOT of people seems to only be good for around 4.3 Ghz no matter the settings and doubly with the F4 BIOS (so far sticking with it as the only "official" change with the F5 is support for an awesomesauce Xeon with 10 cores that wont be coming soon...or ever) My problem is one that many others seem to have as well but I'm not sure the cause or of a solution as I've yet to find anyone with the issue that has fixed it.

 

MY PROBLEM AND WHY I'M HERE

 

As you can see in the CPU-Z shot the BCLK is @ 99.76 in Windows (8.1 x64 if anyone cares), it's 99.8 in BIOS and set to 100 in BIOS.  With this everything seems to act perfectly normal, no stability issues, no problems everything works as expected. However ANY adjustment up or down to try and actually get it set to 100ish in windows causes the onboard NIC to go loopy and transfer at a max of around 3MB/s. set it back to 100 in BIOS and boom back to ~100MB/s from my server.  Reading around I found a fair number of folks who the NIC just doesn't seem to work right for them or in some cases with any BCLK OC just stops working at all.  I've tried swapping for about  7 diff drivers and a fair number of tweaks others have suggested with no answer.  

 

I could just live with it, but I want to get the most I can out of this system and that means another 11mhz+  

 

So anyone got any ideas? Even bad ones?

[Waco]

If you're that worried about it, disable the onboard NIC and get a crappy cheap PCIe NIC.

 

 

That dumb idea aside...it's odd that it'd flake out trying to match 100 MHz exactly. Does it do the same thing at stock speeds? Can you use any of the higher CPU base clock straps without issue (does 2011 even have those)?

[cchalogamer]

It does support the higher straps, and for some reason I haven't tried that. (Thought about it last night @ 2am just before I remembered I had a 9am job and needed to get a tire fixed before it) Also the "dumb" idea of the PCIe NIC, had one in my cart when I said...wait let me try defaulting the BIOS and figured out where the problems was.

 

All it takes from bone stock auto settings to start screwing with it is getting the BCLK in windows right around 100MHz.  It's strange because I've never seen a board do something like this.  Hell I have another board with the SAME Intel LAN chip that doesn't.

[cchalogamer]

Just as side note for anyone who has one of the boards with the same issues, Rev 1.1 with the F5 BIOS does NOT fix the LAN speed problems with BCLK adjustments, and 1.25 Strap seems a LOT less stable, actually to the point where I didn't even get around to testing the LAN speed even at a lower speeds than my usual OC.