Zotac 9300 ITX, can you undervolt yet?

Stonedofmoo · 18 Jun 2009 at 19:58

Hi all

I know there are a lot of Zotax 9300 owners on here so I was wondering if you know about undervolting on this board?
From the reviews I've read they were unable to undervolt their chips, but I was wondering if this situation had been rectified now the BIOS has had time to mature?

Reason I ask is my Q6600 runs happily at 1.025v instead of the 1.265v it was rated at, and this makes it run very cool and use significantly less power under load.

Cheers

Black Hat · 19 Jun 2009 at 21:01

Nope ive emailed Zotac Hong Kong and they arent intrested, email :

1) CMOS Control of "Undervoltage CPU" ---> set to voltage figure lower than the CPU Spec ?
The existing BIOS do not allow any setting for "Undervoltage CPU ---> lower than the CPU's norminal spec".
It only allow setting CPU voltage to slightly higher value.

I think the intention to set "CPU undervoltage" is for power saving, right ? However, setting the CPU voltage to lower than the rated specification will definitely affect the CPU's reliability when running. Intel had done qualification of their CPU (at a pre-defined voltage) before shipping out the CPU. Operating the CPU at a lower voltage will leave no safe margin for the CPU. We do not suggest to do this.

On the other hand, power saving can be archieve by some other means in the Operating System level (Windows).

Quite dissapointed in their customer service.

McPhee · 20 Jun 2009 at 00:41

Don't think i'll buy a Zotac board again to be honest, too many little niggles and the company always have some smart-arse reason why they should exist. Their customer service department are quite arrogant (or maybe it's just down to the language barrier?). Either way, as soon as one of the big manufacturers release a decent mITX board the 9300 is getting flogged off.

Stonedofmoo · 20 Jun 2009 at 08:23

That's a shame, however I can confirm setting the voltage lower does not effect reliability, why would it? The chips runs cooler for one and the other motherboard manufacturers provide this feature. Mine even idles at 1600Mhz 0.933v (speedstep) without any issue.

Black Hat · 20 Jun 2009 at 10:48

Stonedofmoo said:
That's a shame, however I can confirm setting the voltage lower does not effect reliability, why would it? The chips runs cooler for one and the other motherboard manufacturers provide this feature. Mine even idles at 1600Mhz 0.933v (speedstep) without any issue.

This is exacly what my reaply was, unfortunatly it took them about 3 weeks to reply to my orginal email so we have another couple of week to wait, i desperatly want EVGA to release a mini itx board atleast then we know theres going to be decent support there.