Thread: P55 cards cheap and overclocking it burn!

Shortly before the launch of motherboards designed around the Intel P55 Express chipset and socket LGA 1156, we noted the difficulty for manufacturers to offer a card below the psychological 100 €. Yet we find in our comparator three references below the hundred euros, and slightly above.

One can guess that to achieve such a tariff, manufacturers had to make sacrifices on certain points. It seems that they chose the story of processor power as victims. As to render any overclocking on these models extremely dangerous! Our colleague Tom's Hardware has indeed been bad surprise to see literally burn out three cards (Gigabyte P55 Pro MSI P55-CD53, and ECS P55H-A) by attempting to overclock a Core i7 870 with 1.40 volts voltage. It rightly notes that the CPU frequency has probably also played a role in increasing significantly the total consumption required to power stages.

The manufacturers contacted by TH confirmed that they had designed their cards for the TDP minimum required by the Core i7 LGA in 1156, 95 watts. In fact the story goes further because it is a standard from the giant Santa Clara, said FMB 09B. The Core i7 900 in the LGA 1366 has FMB 08, which is appropriate to their 130-watt TDP.

The Core i5 and i3 require for between 70 and 85 watts, Intel has created a new in their effect, the FMB 09A. This implies that some motherboards LGA 1156 provided for them (surely they can identify them easily by the presence of a video output) could be de facto incompatible with Core i7 800, but the proper socket!

The overclocking is not recommended for models with entry-level, since it is the present condition in the test of our colleague. Manufacturers are also at fault because they did not include the protection of these cards when the models more high-end have almost always. Why also allow overclock in the bios?ASRock has promised to release a BIOS that fixes the problem on the card, update strongly recommended if you have this model!