Testing Part Two: Overclocking
First up, a disclaimer: Overclocking can cause hardware death, instability, data loss, time loss, explosions, smoke, fire, will void the warranty on all parts involved and is generally a dubious idea.
With that out of the way, I chose a CPU core voltage level of 1.4v for todays OCing, as this is about the limit for most air coolers on a 3770k. Much to my delight, EasyTune6 worked perfectly! This is a big change from the past and a welcome improvement.
With the vcore at 1.4v I was able to achieve the following overclock:
Note the (much) higher ram speed. Most other boards are able to run my ram with this CPU at 1110MHz (DDR3-2220) at 7-10-7-27-1t timings, to get it to boot and run benchmarks on the UD5H I had to increase the timings to 9-12-9.
Even just getting the XMP timings of 2133MHz 7-10-7 to run proved to be impossible, though 8-10-7 worked just fine. For some reason this board requires higher CAS than others. (The ASRock Z77 Extreme6 had the same issue)
On the other hand I did get some extra speed, and I was able to boot (though not run benchmarks) at 1300MHz with tweaking, far higher than any other board I have used this chip and ram on.
As long as we’re talking about overclocking I’ll talk about the BIOS/UEFI a bit. Essentially it is the same old Gigabyte BIOS layout with prettier colors. The overclocking options are spread out over a number of difference pages and arranged somewhat oddly. The new part is the voltage page, it splits into individual pages for different parts as well as giving you a lot of options for swiching speed and OVP/OCP points and such. This is a VERY nice addition. I’d like to see more of the overclocking options on the same page however.
On with the benchmarks!
Maxxmem
1806 is a bit higher! It’s below the other boards I’ve tested due to the looser timings though.
3DMark Vantage
Vantage doesn’t care about timings as much, the UD5H beat the UD3H here despite nearly identical CPU clocks. This is a very solid score for 4.7GHz!
Cinebench 11.5
Cinebench cares a bit more. This is still a very solid score though, it’s not all that far from the X5570 despite having half the cores!
SuperPi 1m and 32m
Just shy of a six minute 32m score. Very good for the conditions I tested under! This is the hardest part of the reviews for me, I always want to spend more time tweaking on things and optimizing like I do when benching competitively. That makes for unfair reviews though. In any case, these scores are good.
WPrime v1.55
In WPrime it trades blows with the UD3H, sort of interesting really.
All told, the board overclocks well and has good performance. The only jaw dropping part for me was hitting 2600MHz on the memory, that was quite impressive and something I haven’t managed on other boards.
