Overclocking

Overclocking with the Gigabyte X79-UD5 with the new "f7" BIOS was very easy indeed, with the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 board out-clocking our ECS sample by a full 200 MHz, matching our result with the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe. As we mentioned before, we also noticed much lower power consumed via the 8-pin when overclocked, even less than the ASUS board, so we ended up fairly satisfied with the result. One disappointing part was that no matter what we tried, we were not able to get our memory to boot at 2400 MHz, but we are fairly certain that this is due to the limited range of some of the timings offered. Of course, clocking results can change drastically with BIOS updates, but the results we got with the new "F7" BIOS left little to be desired.

Overclocked Performance Summary

Cinebench provided a substantial performance increase when over clocked, something that resounds true through the entire series of Intel-based products.


Likewise, SuperPi 32m results proved the same as Cinebench, with substantial performance increases that are also noticed on previous Intel platforms, but the SB-E CPU core design does limit the increases available in SuperPi.


WPrime 1024M numbers further the results, showing that there is true power available when overclocking the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5, dropping the final result by a full 31 seconds when overclocked.


For a bit of 3D action we fired up CodeMaster's F1 2010 to be impressed with the performance boost offered compared to the other products. This does highlight that finally, with the Intel X79 platform offering quad-channel memory support, we are already at near optimal performance in this application, even at stock, while with P67 and Z68 products, we managed to notice quite significant gains in performance that is just not noticed here, as the end result did not even increase by even half an FPS. With that, we can say that the Intel X79 Express platform, at stock, is enough to push Codemaster’s titles to the max, which is pretty impressive, to say the least.


With Codemaster's F1 2010 starting to show it's age, and proving less reliable in showing performance increases, we've added the Shogun 2 DirectX 9 CPU benchmark to our testing suite. In the months to come, it will get added to the main testing section, but for now, it does show a very large increase in performance when run on the overclocked Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5, being highly sensitive to single-threaded CPU performance. The final result increased by almost 33%, much higher than we had expected.