Overclocking

When it comes to overclocking results, we have very limited score results at this point, but as I work through the pile of boards I have here, a more detailed look at how each performs will be possible. I will also be reporting the voltage required on each board to hit our 4.6 GHz overclock with full stability, which does include passing a 12-hour test session with Prime95. I personally feel that all a user should need to adjust is CPU voltage, and perhaps IMC voltage based on what DIMMs are used, in order to easily reach a 24/7 stable overclock. I am also using a G.SKill 2400 MHz 8 GB kit for all overclock testing, and do expect that each board should have no issues with this kit, but time will tell, of course. If I run into any issues, you can be sure that I'll be reporting on them.


Overclocking with the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi with the new "F7" BIOS was very easy. It was just a matter of enabling XMP and adjusting CPU voltage as needed. There was a fair amount of voltage droop on the CPU, which is natural for how Intel CPUs run, however, to get the 1.18 V our CPU needs to run 4.6 GHz, required that we set 1.225 V in BIOS. Enabling the 2400 MHz XMP profile for my G.SKill TridentX memory went without a hitch as well, but I did notice that both IMC and vDIMM voltages were higher than they needed to be, so I manually adjusted them to the proper levels.

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.


WPrime 1024M numbers further the results, showing that there is true power available when overclocking the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi, dropping the final result by a full 39 seconds when overclocked, a larger increase than we have seen on some X79 Express-based products!.


For a bit of 3D action we fired up CodeMaster's F1 2010 to find that very minimal gains were available when overclocking, most likely due to GPU limitations. Hopefully I'll be able to update my test VGAs with current cards soon.


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 Z77-UD5H WiFi, being highly sensitive to single-threaded CPU performance. The final result increased by almost 33%, much higher than I had expected.