If Digital Storm is willing to back up their systems with a 10 yr CPU warranty, then why all the hand wringing? 10 years is a long, long, time. Kudos to them for such a far reaching commitment. If they say it's all good, >1.5v for short periods of time is acceptable, then who am I to argue?
Really though, I'm blown away by the decade long CPU warranty. That's just crazy, and I don't know how they're going to honor it 9 years in (but I'd like to know). Props to DigitalStorm for having the balls and the foresight for what amounts to marrying their customers.
I agree with everything you say; but I wonder how frequently CPUs fail? I personally have *never* had a CPU fail, and I've owned more than a dozen. Others on this site have undoubtedly owned more than I have. Anecdotal evidence anyone?
I have an old VIA Samuel 2 based system that I bult in 2002 that is still chugging away in a corner making nightly backups of my server. About 5 years ago the CPU fan died and I didn't bother to replace it. The CPU sits at a constant 50C - 60C, and if I do anything intense (which is almost pointless given how slow it is, but occasionally I drop a bunch of videos on it from my digital camera and let it chew on re-compressing them, which takes hours/days but I don't really care as it's not time critical), it gets up to 80C or so.
And yet, 9 years on, it's still going strong. Nothing on that system has ever died, not even the hard drive. It's a P.O.S. PCChips motherboard and it's just been completely flawless for 9 years now.
I have high confidence that just about any CPU will last 10 years easily, but maybe others have different experiences.
The first and only thing that would fail is the capacitors for the CPU-PWM supply on the motherboard, I wonder if this would be considered "cpu related".
While I won't argue with them on what v-core is right and what's not, i remember Anand having an article a couple of months back on "what is a reasonable overclock", basically you generally hit a wall where v-core requirements start going up sharply for small clock increases and a good practise is to place yourself at or just below that kink in the curve.
I have the same motherboard and case as this digitalstorm, albeit with a 2500k cpu. While i haven't spent any time tweaking it the built in "oc automation" that i accidentally activated placed it at 4.4 Ghz and 1.29 V peak v-core. I have a really hard time seeing how those 300 extra Mhz are worth yet another 0.2 V, but i guess thats how you end up with chart-topping benchmarks.
I will agree that I've had a LOT more failed motherboards over the years, but I've definitely burned out CPUs with overclocking. It usually shows up initially as performance degradation--a CPU that would overclock to 3.4GHz becomes unstable, and you have to drop the overclock down to 3.0GHz for example. I had that happen with a Pentium D 920 as well as an earlier Pentium 4; eventually the only way that CPU would run at all was to underclock it (but still with higher voltage than spec). I had a couple AMD Athlon X2 chips take a similar route, one socket 939 and another was one of the first AM2 chips.
Anyway, it does happen, and the best way to do it is overly high voltages. That said, I've never burned out a CPU running it at stock. They become really slow compared to modern CPUs, but as long as the motherboard (and RAM, GPU, etc.) don't fail the processors almost never go out running stock clocks.
This ^ is what I've seen, reminds me of a dimming lightbulb you have to crank it up to a higher voltage to get the same result. your burning out transistors at a certain rate which if you run something like Super Pi you can see the processing power degrade even though clocks are the same. Strange anomilies which change with architecture and process.
Are you sure these are not just issues with ripple on the supply side to the CPU (i.e any measurements, swapping motherboard or the like).
I'm not saying i'm sure of this, it's just in line with my experience. But I've only dabbled in small temporary OC's with jumpers on socket 939 and the like. The only long time experiences i have are with Core2Duo/Quad and now a short stint of Sandy. My experience with a Core2Quad for example saw unstability develop (after initially having proven prime95 stable over 24 hrs) at 3.6 Ghz on a p35 motherboard at 1.37 V over 1.5-2 years, when that was swapped out for an Asus board all was fine again at the same frequencies with slightly lower voltage. Now this might be that the Asus board simply was more stable, but the processor had not seen any degradation.
How older architectures are affected I don't know, I just wonder if you've verified that it is in fact the processor and not something else.
A warrantee will replace your CPU at it's current replacement cost, not the original purchase. So in 5 years when the performance of a 2600K is $90, it won't be so hard. In 8 years it'll be less.
Anyone buying this now will probably upgrade long before it's up, so the effective range of the warranty is probably only around 3 years.
Can you buy a new Pentium 3 today? You could ten years ago. It'd be a little harder today. In the year 2021 I would imagine 2600k's aren't falling of of trees; I'm sure it would be harder to honor than it sounds. In the near term it's expensive, in the medium term they'll get cheaper and cheaper, then in six years become very hard to find. So they have to stockpile them, replace the CPU and motherboard with a newer version, or Intel has agreed to make the socket 1155 for the rest of eternity. I was just curious about the practical ramifications of what I consider a silly long time for a warranty for a component. Kudos to DigitalStorm.
I think his point was that they'll just give you what they value it at when it dies, which a lot of companies do in other industries now that products and parts don't stay on the market indefinitely.
Although even if they decided on a flat $300 or so they should be covered by inflation, the profit they made off the rest of the unit as a whole, insurance, tax write-offs, etc.
I don't know if US law is different to UK law in this regard but if the cpu was to die during the 10 yr guarantee period, in say year 9, then DigitalStorm would be obliged to replace it with an equivalent chip ...or better.
As the customer, I would interpret that to be Intel's latest/last mid range release. So for example, if I had had a duff i7-750 in a DigitalStorm unit, with that chip having gone eol some years past, I would today be expecting a 2600k as replacement...which of course means a mobo change also as the two are integral to each other.
If you go back 5 years ago... the TOP Dog CPU was the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, which was about $500 USD.
Today, a $60 AMD X2 bottom end CPU is just as fast and its a 1 year old CPU. So it takes about 3~4 years for a $500~900 CPU to be replaced by a $100 or less bottom end model.
Is there a typo, don't recall an i7-750. An i5-750, yes.
Common sense, they'd have to replace the board and maybe the memory too if an O/C CPU dies. I'm sure they'll be updating the BIOS with better controls ASAP still. If in 5 years, they need to replace the CPU, as long as its faster - even at $60, it'll be fair. With 16GB costing about $200 today, it should be about $20 in 10 years :)
LOL... you'll be OLD and saying "I remember the says when we had 2 core CPUs! Imagine that! Can't imagine how I got anything down with 3Ghz Quads"
Would warranty of the CPU cover the labor to replace it and the system board?
In Silverstone's FT03 manual, they strongly recommend removing the angled 120mm fan shroud under the video cards and mounting a pair of 80mm fans in its place when using two cards in Crossfire/SLI.
It isn't too bad a cost for a combo drive. Try pricing out (or even finding these days) a slim slot load BD burner! Back when the Panasonic one was available, they were running close to $600 for just the bare drive!
I did a quick price search and the Optiarc used in this DigitalStorm rig runs about $150. Expensive? Yes, however not exorbitantly so.
Granted I'm not a modder extraordinaire, but that paint job is really bad; you can see splotches all over the place on the black. They either rushed it or they didn't do even coats.
I think those splotches are finger/hand prints. I have the silver version and my daughter pawed it over with her grubby hands and I had to scrub it to get the metal to look even again.
This system is very similar component wise to the 2600k/P8P67M-PRO system I built at launch except that I am running 2 gtx 470's. I can confirm the issues they describe with voltage stability, in order to ensure vcore never dropped below 1.39v while folding at 4.7ghz (it will blue screen if it does) I had to use a +.135v offset which would shoot the cpu-z voltage up to 1.48v if it was at full speed without a load. However, just a couple days ago I upgraded to a leaked 0708 bios dated early may (found it in a forum thread, google brings it right up) and the LLC is now rock solid. I only get a one increment warble now and it actually brings the board on part with the good full atx overclockers. While I don't expect you to upgrade to unofficially released bios versions for your review, I do recommend this for anyone running one of these boards.
Still, seeing a boutique comfortable warrantying those sort of voltages makes me feel better about pushing mine a bit more...
That's awesome news. I'll share this with our team and hopefully Asus will publish an official BIOS update that will help achieve a stable overclock at lower offset settings.
Actually I just checked Asus's website again and they just released a newer 0709 bios last week. That should bring the stable LLC with an official BIOS.
I'm really glad they finally sorted this out, the P8P67M-Pro is currently the only real viable option for a mATX overclocking board that supports sli and it has been frustrating to have it hampered with flaky bios versions. If you find the same results with voltage stability that I did then this should go a long way towards improving the power draw, noise, and thermals of this little powerhouse.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
Back to Article
HilbertSpace - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Where's the noise results?Spazweasel - Friday, May 20, 2011 - link
Seconded. Something's missing!ckryan - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
If Digital Storm is willing to back up their systems with a 10 yr CPU warranty, then why all the hand wringing? 10 years is a long, long, time. Kudos to them for such a far reaching commitment. If they say it's all good, >1.5v for short periods of time is acceptable, then who am I to argue?Really though, I'm blown away by the decade long CPU warranty. That's just crazy, and I don't know how they're going to honor it 9 years in (but I'd like to know). Props to DigitalStorm for having the balls and the foresight for what amounts to marrying their customers.
bji - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
I agree with everything you say; but I wonder how frequently CPUs fail? I personally have *never* had a CPU fail, and I've owned more than a dozen. Others on this site have undoubtedly owned more than I have. Anecdotal evidence anyone?I have an old VIA Samuel 2 based system that I bult in 2002 that is still chugging away in a corner making nightly backups of my server. About 5 years ago the CPU fan died and I didn't bother to replace it. The CPU sits at a constant 50C - 60C, and if I do anything intense (which is almost pointless given how slow it is, but occasionally I drop a bunch of videos on it from my digital camera and let it chew on re-compressing them, which takes hours/days but I don't really care as it's not time critical), it gets up to 80C or so.
And yet, 9 years on, it's still going strong. Nothing on that system has ever died, not even the hard drive. It's a P.O.S. PCChips motherboard and it's just been completely flawless for 9 years now.
I have high confidence that just about any CPU will last 10 years easily, but maybe others have different experiences.
slacr - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
The first and only thing that would fail is the capacitors for the CPU-PWM supply on the motherboard, I wonder if this would be considered "cpu related".While I won't argue with them on what v-core is right and what's not, i remember Anand having an article a couple of months back on "what is a reasonable overclock", basically you generally hit a wall where v-core requirements start going up sharply for small clock increases and a good practise is to place yourself at or just below that kink in the curve.
I have the same motherboard and case as this digitalstorm, albeit with a 2500k cpu. While i haven't spent any time tweaking it the built in "oc automation" that i accidentally activated placed it at 4.4 Ghz and 1.29 V peak v-core. I have a really hard time seeing how those 300 extra Mhz are worth yet another 0.2 V, but i guess thats how you end up with chart-topping benchmarks.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
I will agree that I've had a LOT more failed motherboards over the years, but I've definitely burned out CPUs with overclocking. It usually shows up initially as performance degradation--a CPU that would overclock to 3.4GHz becomes unstable, and you have to drop the overclock down to 3.0GHz for example. I had that happen with a Pentium D 920 as well as an earlier Pentium 4; eventually the only way that CPU would run at all was to underclock it (but still with higher voltage than spec). I had a couple AMD Athlon X2 chips take a similar route, one socket 939 and another was one of the first AM2 chips.Anyway, it does happen, and the best way to do it is overly high voltages. That said, I've never burned out a CPU running it at stock. They become really slow compared to modern CPUs, but as long as the motherboard (and RAM, GPU, etc.) don't fail the processors almost never go out running stock clocks.
Hargak - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
This ^ is what I've seen, reminds me of a dimming lightbulb you have to crank it up to a higher voltage to get the same result. your burning out transistors at a certain rate which if you run something like Super Pi you can see the processing power degrade even though clocks are the same. Strange anomilies which change with architecture and process.slacr - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Are you sure these are not just issues with ripple on the supply side to the CPU (i.e any measurements, swapping motherboard or the like).I'm not saying i'm sure of this, it's just in line with my experience. But I've only dabbled in small temporary OC's with jumpers on socket 939 and the like. The only long time experiences i have are with Core2Duo/Quad and now a short stint of Sandy. My experience with a Core2Quad for example saw unstability develop (after initially having proven prime95 stable over 24 hrs) at 3.6 Ghz on a p35 motherboard at 1.37 V over 1.5-2 years, when that was swapped out for an Asus board all was fine again at the same frequencies with slightly lower voltage. Now this might be that the Asus board simply was more stable, but the processor had not seen any degradation.
How older architectures are affected I don't know, I just wonder if you've verified that it is in fact the processor and not something else.
MilwaukeeMike - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
A warrantee will replace your CPU at it's current replacement cost, not the original purchase. So in 5 years when the performance of a 2600K is $90, it won't be so hard. In 8 years it'll be less.Anyone buying this now will probably upgrade long before it's up, so the effective range of the warranty is probably only around 3 years.
ckryan - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Can you buy a new Pentium 3 today? You could ten years ago. It'd be a little harder today. In the year 2021 I would imagine 2600k's aren't falling of of trees; I'm sure it would be harder to honor than it sounds. In the near term it's expensive, in the medium term they'll get cheaper and cheaper, then in six years become very hard to find. So they have to stockpile them, replace the CPU and motherboard with a newer version, or Intel has agreed to make the socket 1155 for the rest of eternity. I was just curious about the practical ramifications of what I consider a silly long time for a warranty for a component. Kudos to DigitalStorm.randinspace - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
I think his point was that they'll just give you what they value it at when it dies, which a lot of companies do in other industries now that products and parts don't stay on the market indefinitely.Although even if they decided on a flat $300 or so they should be covered by inflation, the profit they made off the rest of the unit as a whole, insurance, tax write-offs, etc.
fingerbob69 - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
I don't know if US law is different to UK law in this regard but if the cpu was to die during the 10 yr guarantee period, in say year 9, then DigitalStorm would be obliged to replace it with an equivalent chip ...or better.As the customer, I would interpret that to be Intel's latest/last mid range release. So for example, if I had had a duff i7-750 in a DigitalStorm unit, with that chip having gone eol some years past, I would today be expecting a 2600k as replacement...which of course means a mobo change also as the two are integral to each other.
Belard - Saturday, May 14, 2011 - link
If you go back 5 years ago... the TOP Dog CPU was the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, which was about $500 USD.Today, a $60 AMD X2 bottom end CPU is just as fast and its a 1 year old CPU. So it takes about 3~4 years for a $500~900 CPU to be replaced by a $100 or less bottom end model.
Is there a typo, don't recall an i7-750. An i5-750, yes.
Common sense, they'd have to replace the board and maybe the memory too if an O/C CPU dies. I'm sure they'll be updating the BIOS with better controls ASAP still. If in 5 years, they need to replace the CPU, as long as its faster - even at $60, it'll be fair. With 16GB costing about $200 today, it should be about $20 in 10 years :)
LOL... you'll be OLD and saying "I remember the says when we had 2 core CPUs! Imagine that! Can't imagine how I got anything down with 3Ghz Quads"
Would warranty of the CPU cover the labor to replace it and the system board?
qwertymac93 - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Hmm, dual 590s? trade those for dual 6950's and upgrade the SSD to a 240GB vertex 3, then we are talkin'.qwertymac93 - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Meant 580, Not 590. Man, not having an edit feature sucks...MeSh1 - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
No peek inside?arthur449 - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
In Silverstone's FT03 manual, they strongly recommend removing the angled 120mm fan shroud under the video cards and mounting a pair of 80mm fans in its place when using two cards in Crossfire/SLI.Azfar - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Err..i'm a bit confused looking at the optical drive bay. the conventional drive won't work at this slot type....right ?JarredWalton - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Correct; you need a slot-loading slim laptop drive, which adds to the overall cost.Zap - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
It isn't too bad a cost for a combo drive. Try pricing out (or even finding these days) a slim slot load BD burner! Back when the Panasonic one was available, they were running close to $600 for just the bare drive!I did a quick price search and the Optiarc used in this DigitalStorm rig runs about $150. Expensive? Yes, however not exorbitantly so.
Abix - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Noise results?crimson117 - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Is a genius.demonbug - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Heh, I just watched that with my son the other day... great article title.DigitalFreak - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Still looks like a trash can... now with a red lid!zero2dash - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
And a bad spraypaint job to boot! o.OGranted I'm not a modder extraordinaire, but that paint job is really bad; you can see splotches all over the place on the black. They either rushed it or they didn't do even coats.
TIGGAH - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
I think those splotches are finger/hand prints. I have the silver version and my daughter pawed it over with her grubby hands and I had to scrub it to get the metal to look even again.DigitalStorm - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
@zero2dash.The black is actually just finger prints on the metal surface of the chassis. We only had the red trim pieces painted. I hope that clears it up. =]
Warm Regards,
Harjit
Digital Storm
Omid.M - Thursday, May 12, 2011 - link
Because of that awesome title.xxtypersxx - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Great Review.This system is very similar component wise to the 2600k/P8P67M-PRO system I built at launch except that I am running 2 gtx 470's. I can confirm the issues they describe with voltage stability, in order to ensure vcore never dropped below 1.39v while folding at 4.7ghz (it will blue screen if it does) I had to use a +.135v offset which would shoot the cpu-z voltage up to 1.48v if it was at full speed without a load. However, just a couple days ago I upgraded to a leaked 0708 bios dated early may (found it in a forum thread, google brings it right up) and the LLC is now rock solid. I only get a one increment warble now and it actually brings the board on part with the good full atx overclockers. While I don't expect you to upgrade to unofficially released bios versions for your review, I do recommend this for anyone running one of these boards.
Still, seeing a boutique comfortable warrantying those sort of voltages makes me feel better about pushing mine a bit more...
DigitalStorm - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
That's awesome news. I'll share this with our team and hopefully Asus will publish an official BIOS update that will help achieve a stable overclock at lower offset settings.Cheers,
Harjit
xxtypersxx - Friday, May 13, 2011 - link
Actually I just checked Asus's website again and they just released a newer 0709 bios last week. That should bring the stable LLC with an official BIOS.I'm really glad they finally sorted this out, the P8P67M-Pro is currently the only real viable option for a mATX overclocking board that supports sli and it has been frustrating to have it hampered with flaky bios versions. If you find the same results with voltage stability that I did then this should go a long way towards improving the power draw, noise, and thermals of this little powerhouse.
DigitalStorm - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - link
Perfect.