Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

Now traditionally Gigabyte has not been known as ‘The Overclockers Choice’, but that is a perception that the company is working hard to change. Back in May, Gigabyte held the Spring Break & Plug-Fest 2008 benchmarking event in which they unveiled their P45 lineup and allowed several dozen journalists to poke and prod the new models as they saw fit. Not only did this event reaffirm Gigabyte’s commitment to producing enthusiast-friendly motherboards, but it also allowed the company to receive priceless feedback on what to fix and improve before the models were released.

As a result of this renewed focus on overclocking, we were definitely anxious to test out the EP45-DQ6’s capabilities. Now we won’t go into detail, but our initial experience with the board was downright dreadful, as the included F5 bios was clearly immature. No worries though, a quick visit to Gigabyte’s website revealed the much more recent F10a bios. This bios was significantly better (which is not saying much!), but its memory overclocking capabilities were still subpar, and it required pin-point accurate tweaking of nearly every relevant BIOS settings in order to achieve a stable 490Mhz FSB. Thankfully, on August 19th, Gigabyte came through in a big way and provided us with the F10k bios. This beta BIOS, which was the precursor to the now publicly available F10o, completely changed the character of the board and allowed us to achieve the following results.

Before starting, please note that Everest, MemSet and CPU-Z all mistakenly report the memory type as DDR3. Also, MemSet misreports the memory clocks, so rely on CPU-Z instead.

Maximum FSB Stability Overclocking
Click for full size…



Now, for full disclosure purposes, this is not actually the highest stable FSB that this motherboard is capable of…we think. Due to time constraints, and the fact that we had to redo all of our testing with the F10k BIOS, we had to stop somewhere and five-hundred-and-fifty seemed like a good solid number. After all, 550Mhz at 1.40V is nothing to scoff, it is in fact an excellent and surprising result. When we first received the EP45-DQ6 we were honestly a little worried that this model wouldn’t be a great overclocker due to sheer number of things that Gigabyte has jam-packed onto the PCB. However, as you can see this was clearly not the case. From our experiences, the key to unlocking high stable FSBs with this model rests with high VTT (1.40-1.50) & PLL (1.60-1.80) voltages, mild vNB voltages (1.36-1.44V), and a ‘perfect’ MCH Reference voltage, everything else can be set to AUTO.

Now some of you may be focusing on the tRD (Performance Level) of 10, which is relatively high. However, you have to take into consideration that the P45 chipset does not appear to be capable of running with a tRD under 10 when using the 1:1 memory ratio. We experienced this same issue with our ASUS P5Q PRO, and have read about similar user experiences on various forums. We wanted to test tRD levels with another memory ratio, but with an FSB this high, the second lowest ratio (x 2.40) would have required memory capable of 1320Mhz, which we simply do not have on hand…yet. We were however able to get up to 515Mhz with a tRD of 8, as you can see in our memory overclocking results. Nevertheless, even with a tRD of 10, this motherboard is very fast when using the 1:1 memory ratio.

For the curious among you who aren’t satisfied with the mere’ 550Mhz FSB, we will be posting the true maximum FSB on our forums within a few days.


Maximum Memory Stability Overclocking
Click for full size…


As you can see, we were once again able to surpass the 10,000 MB/s Everest Read speed milestone, which was once a feat achieved only by an elite few benchmarkers. However, that is not the surprising news. Prior to this review, we were under the impression that this OEM Micron PC2-5300 kit (with D9GMH ICs) topped out at about a stable DDR2-1216. They had achieved this same result on 2-3 different motherboards, so it was a logical assumption. However, the EP45-DQ6 threw all logic aside and we were able to extract another 20Mhz, pushing these relatively ordinary 667Mhz modules up to 1236MHz 5-5-5-15…an 85% overclock! We are not entirely sure what Gigabyte has done to this motherboard (Voodoo comes to mind), but it certainly impressed us with its memory overclocking prowess. In all seriousness though, we can likely attribute this new record to the rarely seen Drive Strength memory options that Gigabyte has wisely included in the BIOS (F10k & newer). Having said that, we did not actually have to individually tweak any of the Drive Strength settings since Gigabyte has provided convenient Drive Strength Profiles (AUTO/667/800/1066/OC-1200/OC-1333+).

Last, but not least, do notice the very low memory latency. Gigabyte has obviously done a top-notch job tweaking this new BIOS, and we are excited to see what kind of numbers world-class overclockers will be able to achieve with this motherboard.


Maximum Overall Stability Overclocking
Click for full size…


That’s right, this motherboard gave us enough confidence to recommend it for 500Mhz FSB 24/7 use. This is not something we would do with a lesser board, but considering the relatively low voltages required, the capable cooling system, and the excellent stability the EP45-DQ6 exhibited throughout our tests, we have no qualms about using it at such a high front side bus speed. 4.0Ghz/500Mhz FSB/DDR2-1200…does it get much better? Not really, this is a speed demon with great features. We are going to be using these clock speeds as the overclocked configuration in the subsequent benchmarking section.