Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

Overclocking the Bloomfield/X58 platform is quite different then anything else on the market, even Lynnfield/P55. There are five clock speeds (CPU/BCLK/MEM/UCLK/QPI) and four multipliers (CPU/MEM/UCLK/QPI) to tweak and monitor, as well as eight different important voltages. Put simply, there are lot of variables and potential limitations that an overclocker must now take into consideration.

While overclocking we used the F3k beta BIOS, whereas we used the public F3g for our benchmarking results. Ultimately, there wasn't any discernible difference between the two during our overclocking endeavours. Voltage wise we tested up to 1.40vCore, 1.50V VTT/QPI, 1.96V CPU PLL, 1.70V PCIE, 1.30V QPI PLL, 1.30v IOH Core, 1.70V ICH I/O, 1.30V ICH Core, and 1.70vDIMM.

Highest Stable BCLK Overclock

With the X58A-UD7 we were able to achieve our best BCLK results yet, just sneaking by the 214.8 MHz we achieved on the ASUS Rampage II Gene. 217-218MHz were achievable with EasyTune, but all stability went out the window and there were visual artifacts. Our results are very likely skill/time limited though, and we have seen a large cross-section of results whereby this motherboard easily achieved 220-237Mhz BCLK's on air and water. Gigabyte have definitely learned from their original EX58 series and have done hardware modifications to their design to ensure much better BCLK capabilities.

Highest Stable CPU Overclock

Our CPU overclocking results are nothing to write home about, but that's simply because our low leakage chip runs hotter than the surface of the sun. Utilizing the highest possible achievable-but-unstable BCLK we were able to hit up to 4.55Ghz.

Highest Stable Memory Overclock

The only area in which the X58A-UD7 did not distinguish itself was memory overclocking. While the results are very good, this particular G.Skill Trident PC3-16000 has proven itself capable of DDR3-2100 9-9-9-24-98-1T on an ASUS Rampage II Extreme, which we couldn't achieve no matter the voltage or secondary memory timing. Others have also remarked about this model's lower memory overclocking capabilities, so hopefully Gigabyte can address this in a future BIOS release.