Overclocking Results

One of the best parts about purchasing a highly capable overclocking motherboards is the ability to tweak every minuet detail in the voltages and clock speeds to achieve the most stable overclock possible. Our particular test bench’s core is running the venerable i7-920. We’ve been able to reach 4GHz on our test bench with this CPU and we are hoping to get close to this mark here as well. .

During initial overclocking, I was able to bump the base clock to 184MHz before having to increase the CPU voltage. After increasing the voltage, I was able to increase the base clock all the way to 198MHz before I noticed stability issues. So, I backed it down to 187MHz and that seemed to be the sweet spot for this board.

After trying a couple other changes to the BIOS, we weren’t able to stably get the X58A-UD3R over 4GHz. The highest stable speed we were able to achieve was 3.927GHz. We are going to evaluate the actual chip we used during overclocking because there might be some degradation after being used for multiple overclocking tests with other motherboards.

Here’s more info on the settings we used during our overclocking efforts:

 

Gigabyte X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 ATX Motherboard Review - Motherboards 72
We got all the way up to 3.989GHz, but had difficulties keeping it stable during load testing.

 

Gigabyte X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 ATX Motherboard Review - Motherboards 73
Here’s a quick screenshot of the boot screen after the BIOS reset due to a couple BSODs we saw during our overclocking efforts. This is a handy screen I’ve never seen before during overclocking. It’s nice to have a message like the one above to confirm that the BIOS reset successfully with its default settings.


CPU Speed BCLK CPU Multiplier QPI DRAM Frequency DRAM Timings CPU Voltage Temp (Idle) Temp (Load)
3.927GHz 187 MHz 21x with Intel Turbo Boost 3366 MHz 1486MHz 10-9-9-25 1T 1.328v 47c, 45c, 46c, 43c
74c, 74c, 72c, 70c

Overclocking Results

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