Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 Motherboard Review

Benchmarking Methodology

For this review, our benchmarking section will focus solely on the Gigabyte EP45-DQ6, in stock and overclocked configuration. The reasoning behind this approach is that there is often a miniscule clock-for-clock performance difference between two motherboards that share an identical chipset and declaring one product a winner based on a 1% performance advantages seems futile to us.

We have outlined the two setups in the sample graph to the right. The blue results will indicate the performance at the BIOS defaults. The only changes that will be made are to the memory in order to get it running at its rated frequency and timings. Every other setting will be at the default that the BIOS sets. The red results are going to display the overall best overclock we found for this particular setup.

These overclock results are again, the best overall overclock we could manage with this motherboard and the hardware used in the review. As was mentioned in the overclocking section, we used Everest bandwidth benchmarks and a few other performance tests to determine which settings were ultimately faster, not just higher. For all of the benchmarks, appropriate lengths are taken to ensure an equal comparison through methodical setup, installation, and testing. The following outlines our testing methodology:

A) Windows is installed using a full format.

B) Intel Chipset drivers and accessory hardware drivers (audio, network, GPU) are installed followed by a defragment and a reboot.

C) Programs and games are then installed followed by another defragment.

D) Windows updates are then completed installing all available updates followed by a defragment.

E) Benchmarks are each ran three times after a clean reboot for every iteration of the benchmark unless otherwise stated, the results are then averaged.

We have listed the benchmark versions on each graph as results can vary between updates. That should about cover everything so let's see what kind of numbers this motherboard puts up in the suite of benchmarks we have chosen.