Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 (Z87) Motherboard Review

With the boards cooling solution, we had high hopes for it in terms of overclocking, and were hoping to at least hit 4.7GHz, but were pleasantly surprised when it surpassed that, and at a reasonable voltage too. We started to tweak the multiplier up from 46 to 47 and on to 48 while keeping the voltage below 1.4V and leaving most of the other voltage settings at their pre-defined auto values and noticed that it didn’t even break a sweat. Once we were happy with 4.8GHz stable, we continued to push it up even further and ended up clocked to 4.9GHz with a voltage of 1.38V with all other settings on auto including ring voltage and SA voltage. This booted into Windows and ran our complete test suite at this speed, which you will see on the next pages.

We did manage to get the board to boot at 5GHz with no issue until we tried to run the combined test within 3DMark 11, where it proceeded to freeze showing us that the system was no 100% stable. An increase in voltage helped a bit, but this lead the voltage to be more than 1.4V which we would not be happy to run in a 24/7 stable environment due to the temperatures the cores would hit under load. Instead, we clawed it back down to 4.9GHz at 1.38V under our Corsair H100i with 100% stability.