Page 12 - Overclocking and Conclusion
As the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is an overclocking/enthusiast oriented overclocking motherboard, combined with an improved X38 chipset -- essentially, the X48 chipset -- overclocking is certainly our main focus. Pushing 1.45V through our Core 2 Duo E6300, we managed a maximum overclock of nearly 3.4GHz at 485MHz FSB with default multiplier of 7x. That's an excellent 82% overclock on the CPU; resulting in a clock speed of nearly 3.4GHz from stock 1.86GHz. This is the highest overclock we've managed on this particular processor, with the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 managing a 5MHz higher FSB than the Asus P5K-Deluxe and Asus P5K3-Deluxe. Any higher seems to be a limitation of the processor itself, therefore we lowered the multiplier and see how high we can reach with the FSB.
Reducing the multiplier to 6x allowed a higher FSB overclocking headroom on the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard. The maximum front side bus we can attain is 505MHz FSB (2020MHz FSB QDR), which is very decent as far as that goes. I've noticed some significant vdroops under load even with CPU Loadline Calibration enabled in the BIOS -- a maximum recorded drop of 0.04-0.05V can be observed. Gigabyte can certainly fix this issue.
Generally speaking, the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 obtained some absolutely excellent overclocking results and we are quite impressed. The heatpipe cooler adequately cooled the chipset, and unless you are running at some high voltages through your Northbridge, it should be good to go. The motherboard is also stable during usage and we haven't experienced any odd issues or strange bugs.
My personal impression back a few years when Gigabyte motherboards were average on the market at best -- with questionable quality and nothing really out of the ordinary. Over the past years, my perception has completely changed as I've only seen drastic improvement and high degrees of attention to all aspects of the board, whether to appeal general enthusiasts or hardcore overclockers -- the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is truly another excellent product from Gigabyte. The package put forth is nothing less than impressive. We can see an excellent retail packaging arrangement, to great performance on paper, extending to very good overclocking results (Besides the vdroop, which can be fixed). Even the integrated sound performance was much better than I thought it would be according to our RMAA tests. Now, for the things I would suggest improvement on, is the BIOS overclocking options which may be a bit unfamiliar to new Gigabyte board users at first -- this is in regards to the wording and how the options are laid out for the user to select and change. Physical board layout in various aspects also has room for improvement, especially considering some are simply mistakes that shouldn't be made if a little more thought was put into it. Regardless, the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is surely an impressive X48 DDR3 board -- it does everything it's meant to be very well; with many exceeding my expectations. At the average retail price of exceeding $320 at press time, however, comparable Asus X48 boards such as the P5E3-Premium has some additional innovative features such as onboard Linux and wireless-N -- you may not use them, but they are nice features to have and it would be nice if Gigabyte is a little more competitive in this area. Besides that, the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is the company's flagship X48 board, and it well deserves the name -- it's definitely worth your serious consideration as part of the hunt for your next high end performance machine.
Special thanks to Angela over at Gigabyte for making this review possible.
APH:Renewal Award
Starting from April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for motherboards, RAM, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings reflected without the limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
It's big, it's fast, it's competitive, and it's awesome -- the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is up for some serious matters in the high end segment. There's a few things they need to fix, but we can't say it's not a great board overall!
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Features, and Specifications
2. Bundle, Chipset, BIOS
3. A Closer Look, Board Layout
4. Test System; Benchmark: 3DMark06
5. Benchmark: PCMark05
6. Benchmark: Cinebench R10, SuperPI 1M
7. Benchmark: EVEREST CPU
8. Benchmark: EVEREST FPU
9. Benchmark: EVEREST Memory
10. Benchmark: EVEREST Memory Latency, HDTach 3.0.1.0
11. Onboard Sound (RMAA 6.06) Analyzation
12. Overclocking and Conclusion
