Overclocking
Overclocking on the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 was a dream for various reasons.  First, the overclocking on it exceeded anything I have been able to pull off on the P35 motherboards and second, the recovery from a failed overclock was painless.  If you accidentally pushed the memory too far, and the system won’t POST after your latest settings, the system reboots several times to attempt to boot your options, then gracefully re-POSTs with your current settings still showing but obviously running at lower speeds.  You can then make more adjustments and try again — it seems simple but motherboards don’t do it well often. 

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Stock 333 MHz FSB

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Stock Memory Settings

Stock settings on the motherboard keep the CPU in its correct frequency within limits and doesn’t attempt to “cheat” in benchmarks by pushing the FSB up a few small steps. 

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 425 MHz FSB Overclock

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 500 MHz FSB Overclock

Hitting the 425 MHz and even 500 MHz was incredibly easy and didn’t require any kind of voltage adjustments either!  This already exceeded the 475 MHz that we saw in the Asus Blitz Formula motherboard that uses the P35 chipset. 

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515 MHz FSB Overclock – Our highest reached!

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515 MHz Memory Overclock

But the fun didn’t stop there; I was able to hit 515 MHz FSB without increasing the voltages to anything but the processor, to which I gave a small 0.1v boost.  Even at the lowest 6x multiplier setting, this brought our 2.66 GHz CPU up to 3.09 GHz without much of a sweat.  The memory from Corsair was running great at 515 MHz (or 1030 MHz DDR2) and kept the system running stable for many hours.
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