Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Z68 Motherboard Review

As we were thrown back into using an older style BIOS, we had to re-familiarise ourselves with the interface, which thankfully only took a few minutes and off we went.

As with all of our performance results, we test at 4.6GHz, so we first tried this with a slight bump in voltages, and were easily greeted with a 100% stable system. Wanting to push things further, we started to raise the multiplier a little bit more, knowing that our 2700k can easily do 5.3GHz with 1.5V, but with a board that hasn’t quite got the same power delivery as other boards, we weren’t too sure on how far things could be pushed.

None the less, we were ready to go and started to increase the voltage a bit more and raise the multiplier bit by bit. 4.7GHz seemed just as easy and so did 4.8GHz, and this is when things started to get interesting, as it seemed as though the board didn’t want to stop there.

We continued with 4.9GHz just by raising the multiplier and all was well with that too. Knowing that our CPU can hit over 5GHz, we had to try 5GHz to see if this budget board could do it. Low and behold it managed to, but as soon as we started to stress it, things got nasty. We gave one more attempt by upping the voltage on the Vcore and things ended up 100% stable at a whopping 5GHz.

It is worth noting that even though we had a fairly high voltage, we were using a Corsair H80 watercooling loop and temperatures were constantly monitored, and we would not recommend pumping through the amount of volts we did without having sufficient cooling first.