Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 Motherboard Review

Overclocking
There are various ways of getting more performance from a system for a very small outlay, and the most common would be to overclock the system. This involves surpassing the recommended performance rating of components to a point that is beyond them.

To overclock, most users would find that altering options directly in the BIOS give the best results, and that’s exactly what we will be doing.

We first decided that 1.55V would be the maximum CPU core voltage we would use but for the most part, the auto voltage settings should do most of the work for us. We would also be running out memory at a slower speed than its stock rating so that it can be put out of the equation and the focus will be solely on the processor.

We were aware that this processor could overclock to 4GHz with little to no effort at all.

This mainly involved increasing a combination of the multiplier and CPU frequency. The voltages all took care of themselves and 4GHz was hit straight away. The voltage for the CPU remained low at around 1.32V but we wanted to see how far we could push this based on our maximum voltage that we chose.

We had various combinations of a higher multiplier and lower frequency and vice versa to squeeze out the very best performance from our i7 950. Whilst we were increasing the speed, we made sure to use HWMonitor to keep temperatures in mind and Prime95 to stress test it to the max.

We were able to get a final overclock of 205×22 to give us 4510MHz but whilst we were able to push it slightly further to 4.7GHz, we found that upon stress testing, the overclock wasn’t stable. The voltage was set to 1.52V and any increase in voltage didn’t change the overall speed we were able to get from the processor.