Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Review

RHKCommander959 - March 18, 2010
» Discuss this article (17)

Lowest Prices

Testing:

With the motherboard unpacked and installed into the test system, it is time to overclock and test it. For overclocking, I will aim to do a decent overclock, testing with Prime95 to look for stability and, upon verifying the Prime95 stability, I will then test it with some intensive graphical benchmarks, as well as number crunchers all covered in the OverclockersClub benchmark series. Throughout this process, I will be keeping an eye on how the board behaves and how warm it operates.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 150x20
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 3x2GB
Video Card: nVidia GTX 260
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 7200.12 1TB
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate x64

Comparison Motherboards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 181x21 3800MHz

Originally I had installed the stock Intel heatsink for testing this motherboard, but I quickly swapped the junk out for my water cooling system and very easily pushed the chip to 3.8 GHz (181 BCLKx21). My C0 i7 920 is a bit of a hog but I believe this board could manage more than 4200 MHz (200 BCLK x 21) with more tweaking of the settings in the BIOS. Quick and dirty but respectable. When I tried settings that the CPU didn't like, the board would recover from the improper settings with a self-reboot. The settings that didn't work are carried over and changeable, and the BIOS can save custom configurations for backup and use later. The motherboard also has a CMOS Clear button on the I/O panel so users who have their cases easily reachable can clear the CMOS on a hard locked system. The board reached 45 °C after long benching with the waterblock installed. A Yate Loon fan tossed nearby the CPU socket dropped the temps down to 33 °C.