Overclocking

Overclocking with the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi was a bit problematic. It did not like my ES C0 chip at first, although this changed with the most recent post BIOS. I did manage to beat the VRM pretty hard with my C1 chip, to the point that I could not get my usual 4.6 GHz stable with that chip, which was not an issue with my new replacement. If you plan on pushing more than 300 Watts through the CPU VRM, I'd advise against it, but around 250 Watts is just fine.

Memory clocked well, as expected. The Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi has just hit retail, and I really did not expect much with such a new BIOS, but it did exceed my expectation, especially considering this is a Workstation product. Workstation users that aren't as familiar with overclocking, but would like a bit extra performance, can push the OC switch on the board's rear I/O for an easy automatic overclock that works fairly well. What speed you get with that button will depend on which chip you have installed.

Overclocked Performance Summary

I have really changed how I do my overclock testing with motherboards now. Every single test you see in the main section is repeated in the section that follows, including power consumption. As I test more products, a good picture of overclocking efficiency should emerge, which should prove interesting when it comes to those products that are 100% overclocking-oriented. I've grouped the results into sections here, and all products are tested with a 4.6 GHz CPU speed. Memory speeds vary depending on the platform's ability.


Power consumption was pretty good with the Gigabyte X79S-UP5, although that doesn't show here as there aren't many X79 results yet. As you can see though, the X79S-UP5 WiFi had no issues pushing 250 Watts through the VRMs, for a total of 409 watts for the entire system. Do keep in mind there was no 3D load here, and that these numbers reflect CPU load only.

AIDA64

AIDA64's memory benchmark does not take full advantage of the quad-channel memory this board supports, so it may looks like it's performing poorly here, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The Z77 boards also use faster memory which skews the results a bit, but that is one of the benefits Z77 offers, making it a fair comparison, especially when overclocking.

CPU OC Performance

CPU overclock performance was very good, with the platform continuing to win in all the same benches that it did at stock. It lost in Cinebench OpenGL and in SuperPi, but that's to be expected. Otherwise, the SKT 2001 is clearly faster overall than the SKT 1155, although many see them as competing with each other.

3D-Oriented OC Performance

Again, SKT 2011, and thereby the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi, wins out in 3D performance, and by considerable margins, too. I really didn't expect the F1 2010 results to have such a gap in them, but it is what it is. If you want the best in performance, SKT 2011 is clearly the choice you must make.