Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 (Z77) Motherboard Review

All I can say, is that I wish we had the first i7 3770k that we had in our labs, as this one was a real pain to clock. We started out with a 46x multiplier which was fine with some basic voltage tweaks to 1.35V and Load Line Calibration set to Extreme. Pushing beyond that seemed nigh on impossible though. The 48x multiplier was a no go from the offset, no matter how many volts you chucked at it, and no matter what the calibration and PWM settings were tweaked to. Instead we decided on the 47x multiplier, which required 1.4V to run stable at, though not happy with this, we decided to tweak the BCLK.

No matter what we did, the BCLK was not going to budge while using the 47x multiplier. By dropping to the 46x multiplier, we could increase the BCLK, but not to a substantial level that would surpass 4.7GHz.

With that in mind, we finally settled on 47×100 @ 1.4V, which isn’t bad, but isn’t fantastic, but on a clock for clock basis, we have to remember that IvyBridge and SandyBridge have no comparison, as these new chips are faster, clock for clock, but can’t quite be pushed as far as our trusty i7 2700k can.