Associate
- Joined
- 7 Apr 2010
- Posts
- 89
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R Review!
Hi all, new to the forums here, I just bought some new parts a 920 D0, 6GB OCZ 1600 7-7-7-24 at 1.65V and The Gigabyte X58A-UD3R. Anyway I thought I'd share my experiences with this new setup, its my first time overclocking an i7 and as the X58A is new enough and also about the cheapest X58 board around its probably going be a popular choice. I thought I'd share my results, also the Forums have been a help to me, so guess I'm giving something back.
Installation
I ran into trouble straight away! Only 4GB Ram detected in Bios and Windows 7 showed 6GB Ram (4GB usable) what the hell is going on???
Did some looking around and got a lot of useless info! One thing that I noticed got said repeatedly though was a bent socket pin? Could this really be it? Answer yes and no. I did take the Cpu out and have a look (so many pins!) they looked good though, and after putting the Cpu back in then the cooler back on, I boot it up and magic, all is well. I guess it just wasn't sitting quite right but honestly I don't think I did anything different the second time around, but it works and I was happy. the 1366 sockets are just really complex! This seems to be a common enough problem too, many posts on the OCZ forums about this.
Other than the above, install was a breeze, connectors are all in fine locations. I'm only using one graphics card, plan to go to two in the future. This board can take up to three, and it shouldn't cause any problems. A third card will cover a few things at the bottom of the board but if you connect everything first, the cables will be flat enough not to interfere. If you are interested there are USB headers, IDE and Floppy along with the front panel connectors, but as I said these sit quite low and shouldn't cause a problem with a third card. That said if you have money for three cards you will probably be looking at a UD7 or something!
All Sata ports are on the side of the board and face to the side and not straight up which I like.
Plenty of Fan headers two are PWM, but only CPU has fully adjustable speed settings. I think 3 of the other 4 adjust speed automatically based on temp.
Windows 7 x64 installed and all drivers from the disc, just to note nearly everything was out of date already, so I nearly wouldn't bother with the disc go get the new stuff straight from Gigabyte website. Bios was also F3 and I updated to F5.
While I have neither a USB3 device or Sata3 Drive, yet! I tested Transfer rates to a flash drive in windows and it is actually slightly faster on the USB3 than the USB2 ports, also using HDtach the Sata3 ports gave a slight boost to the old HDD too(not that they are actually old, just not sata3) it's nothing to write home about, but I'd call it a free speed boost.
Software
Gigabyte is pushing their Smart6 set of tools, it can show you system info, monitor events. Has Auto boost to Overclock. There is a backup utility to backup changed files and for a whole recovery from a partition or other drive. There is a Qshare to share files over a network easily. Auto green uses Bluetooth to put your system to sleep when you move away. Windows 7 now has some decent backup options and Homegroup so you might never use any of this stuff, a few years ago or if you had XP some of this would have been handy.
Best piece of software is DES2 Dynamic Energy Saver, it's been upgraded since last time I used it. power saving is something I've become very interested in. The main display in DES gives you a reading of how much power in Watts your CPU is using. When you enable DES which is a hardware feature the software is just an interface to this. The Power Phase switching is enabled so when your CPU is not on load less phases are used and you save power, DES now also does this for the chipset and the Ram, also it allows you to decrease the voltages and the clocks to all these items too. The new version also allows you to do this with graphics cards, very useful I imagine if you have a new nvidia card, and also has power saving for your HDD's too. You could get your whole system in idle down to just a few Watts, leave it on overnight downloading or something, but then have it all kick into full swing when you need it. Enabling this also turns on all the little LED lights on the motherboard and these go on and off as the phases, voltage levels and clocks change. There must be 20 tiny LED's, it's like a little disco! Best of all you exit DES and it does everything by itself and doesn't run in the background using resources.
Worst piece of software is ET6 its main feature is to allow you to overclock through windows, it doesn't work! It just really does NOT work, and the worst thing is Gigabyte knows this, yet they still include it as this supposedly good feature. It has a simple mode and a more advanced mode, in its simple form you have three buttons to auto overclock. I used this with an E8400 on a P55 board and it was ok, you could go green OC to 3.4 or yellow to 3.6 and then the big RED button to 4.0GHz. The problem is in order to achieve these speeds it uses some high voltages more than you'll need, but Gigabyte I suppose wanted to make sure it would work with all chips so added extra voltage to be sure its stable. Essentially you just select one of the three buttons and restart and you have an OC, While it works I can't recommend you use it.
The Advanced mode allows you to tweak 90% of what you see in the bios, clocks and voltages but it never works, even small changes seem to freeze the whole system. There are options to save configurations and load them up at start-up but these don't work either! I played with this for a while but it's just infuriating! I wasn't expecting much but I had to try couldn't help myself! It's a shame really if you could just find your own overclock setting that you know works, dial them in and when you want to you could just load them in windows and restart and skip the bios. Fingers crossed Gigabyte might eventually do this, cause let's be honest at this stage going in and out of the Bios to overclock is getting a little old, No?
Overclocking
So first thing I decided to do was get the ram running to spec. Everywhere I looked said if you want to run ram at 1600 or anything higher you will need a higher QPI/VTT Voltage, so I did that set it to 1.34 like so many places recommended, OCZ included, and the Voltage to 1.66V no 1.65 on this board no sir! Set the timings manually as no XMP profiles. It passed memtest, and was stable in Prime.
Ok so I was a bit eager to see what this setup could do, with the Voltages I've seen other people use and the voltages from the ET6 software settings as a guide. I just started dialling in the values, the cowboy approach I know, but it worked. If you're not too fussy this board and an i7 D0 stepping isn't either.
Increase:
CPU PLL 1.88V
QPI/Vtt 1.34V
Dram 1.66V
IOH Core 1.2V
ICH Core 1.2V
Then start increasing the BLK and the Vcore towards 1.35V watch your temps and it'll go to 4.0GHz, it will even go to 4.3Ghz with some tweaking.
There are a few things to note, the board goes to 3.6Ghz easily, after that it's not always a huge fan of the 20x multiplier you can use 19x or you can even set 21x and you don't need turbo mode to set it to 21x either.
If you have Ram that'll do 1600MHz or higher you need higher QPI/Vtt, if you set QPI/Vtt to 1.34V you will be fine, but if you don't say your ram is 1066 or 1333, you will still need the Vcore and Qpi/Vtt to be tuned to each other. On this board they really have to be kept within 0.05V of each other, if you increase the BLk and its unstable use more Vcore like +0.025 and if that doesn't do it, then try the same incremental increase to Qpi/Vtt instead.
This is just a taste of its potential and I'm going to do a second post with exactly what is needed to overclock this board properly, it's quite impressive! It's up now, http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18141065
So essentially just ignore what I told you about overclocking and the values used, just know that it is really good!
Conclusion
Ok so I had a few problems, but I really can't complain about this board and I can't recommend it enough. For the money it's just amazing you get all the features of the higher end boards, the same USB3 and Sata3, and you get CrossfireX and SLI too. It lacks slightly in the cooling and doesn't have the 12 phase power for those super high overclocks, but the money you save will get you a better graphics card or an SSD or something else. To me Overclocking was always about this, bang for your buck and your sure to find it here, with a D0 stepping i7 its just superb.
Hi all, new to the forums here, I just bought some new parts a 920 D0, 6GB OCZ 1600 7-7-7-24 at 1.65V and The Gigabyte X58A-UD3R. Anyway I thought I'd share my experiences with this new setup, its my first time overclocking an i7 and as the X58A is new enough and also about the cheapest X58 board around its probably going be a popular choice. I thought I'd share my results, also the Forums have been a help to me, so guess I'm giving something back.
Installation
I ran into trouble straight away! Only 4GB Ram detected in Bios and Windows 7 showed 6GB Ram (4GB usable) what the hell is going on???
Did some looking around and got a lot of useless info! One thing that I noticed got said repeatedly though was a bent socket pin? Could this really be it? Answer yes and no. I did take the Cpu out and have a look (so many pins!) they looked good though, and after putting the Cpu back in then the cooler back on, I boot it up and magic, all is well. I guess it just wasn't sitting quite right but honestly I don't think I did anything different the second time around, but it works and I was happy. the 1366 sockets are just really complex! This seems to be a common enough problem too, many posts on the OCZ forums about this.
Other than the above, install was a breeze, connectors are all in fine locations. I'm only using one graphics card, plan to go to two in the future. This board can take up to three, and it shouldn't cause any problems. A third card will cover a few things at the bottom of the board but if you connect everything first, the cables will be flat enough not to interfere. If you are interested there are USB headers, IDE and Floppy along with the front panel connectors, but as I said these sit quite low and shouldn't cause a problem with a third card. That said if you have money for three cards you will probably be looking at a UD7 or something!
All Sata ports are on the side of the board and face to the side and not straight up which I like.
Plenty of Fan headers two are PWM, but only CPU has fully adjustable speed settings. I think 3 of the other 4 adjust speed automatically based on temp.
Windows 7 x64 installed and all drivers from the disc, just to note nearly everything was out of date already, so I nearly wouldn't bother with the disc go get the new stuff straight from Gigabyte website. Bios was also F3 and I updated to F5.
While I have neither a USB3 device or Sata3 Drive, yet! I tested Transfer rates to a flash drive in windows and it is actually slightly faster on the USB3 than the USB2 ports, also using HDtach the Sata3 ports gave a slight boost to the old HDD too(not that they are actually old, just not sata3) it's nothing to write home about, but I'd call it a free speed boost.
Software
Gigabyte is pushing their Smart6 set of tools, it can show you system info, monitor events. Has Auto boost to Overclock. There is a backup utility to backup changed files and for a whole recovery from a partition or other drive. There is a Qshare to share files over a network easily. Auto green uses Bluetooth to put your system to sleep when you move away. Windows 7 now has some decent backup options and Homegroup so you might never use any of this stuff, a few years ago or if you had XP some of this would have been handy.
Best piece of software is DES2 Dynamic Energy Saver, it's been upgraded since last time I used it. power saving is something I've become very interested in. The main display in DES gives you a reading of how much power in Watts your CPU is using. When you enable DES which is a hardware feature the software is just an interface to this. The Power Phase switching is enabled so when your CPU is not on load less phases are used and you save power, DES now also does this for the chipset and the Ram, also it allows you to decrease the voltages and the clocks to all these items too. The new version also allows you to do this with graphics cards, very useful I imagine if you have a new nvidia card, and also has power saving for your HDD's too. You could get your whole system in idle down to just a few Watts, leave it on overnight downloading or something, but then have it all kick into full swing when you need it. Enabling this also turns on all the little LED lights on the motherboard and these go on and off as the phases, voltage levels and clocks change. There must be 20 tiny LED's, it's like a little disco! Best of all you exit DES and it does everything by itself and doesn't run in the background using resources.
Worst piece of software is ET6 its main feature is to allow you to overclock through windows, it doesn't work! It just really does NOT work, and the worst thing is Gigabyte knows this, yet they still include it as this supposedly good feature. It has a simple mode and a more advanced mode, in its simple form you have three buttons to auto overclock. I used this with an E8400 on a P55 board and it was ok, you could go green OC to 3.4 or yellow to 3.6 and then the big RED button to 4.0GHz. The problem is in order to achieve these speeds it uses some high voltages more than you'll need, but Gigabyte I suppose wanted to make sure it would work with all chips so added extra voltage to be sure its stable. Essentially you just select one of the three buttons and restart and you have an OC, While it works I can't recommend you use it.
The Advanced mode allows you to tweak 90% of what you see in the bios, clocks and voltages but it never works, even small changes seem to freeze the whole system. There are options to save configurations and load them up at start-up but these don't work either! I played with this for a while but it's just infuriating! I wasn't expecting much but I had to try couldn't help myself! It's a shame really if you could just find your own overclock setting that you know works, dial them in and when you want to you could just load them in windows and restart and skip the bios. Fingers crossed Gigabyte might eventually do this, cause let's be honest at this stage going in and out of the Bios to overclock is getting a little old, No?
Overclocking
So first thing I decided to do was get the ram running to spec. Everywhere I looked said if you want to run ram at 1600 or anything higher you will need a higher QPI/VTT Voltage, so I did that set it to 1.34 like so many places recommended, OCZ included, and the Voltage to 1.66V no 1.65 on this board no sir! Set the timings manually as no XMP profiles. It passed memtest, and was stable in Prime.
Ok so I was a bit eager to see what this setup could do, with the Voltages I've seen other people use and the voltages from the ET6 software settings as a guide. I just started dialling in the values, the cowboy approach I know, but it worked. If you're not too fussy this board and an i7 D0 stepping isn't either.
Increase:
CPU PLL 1.88V
QPI/Vtt 1.34V
Dram 1.66V
IOH Core 1.2V
ICH Core 1.2V
Then start increasing the BLK and the Vcore towards 1.35V watch your temps and it'll go to 4.0GHz, it will even go to 4.3Ghz with some tweaking.
There are a few things to note, the board goes to 3.6Ghz easily, after that it's not always a huge fan of the 20x multiplier you can use 19x or you can even set 21x and you don't need turbo mode to set it to 21x either.
If you have Ram that'll do 1600MHz or higher you need higher QPI/Vtt, if you set QPI/Vtt to 1.34V you will be fine, but if you don't say your ram is 1066 or 1333, you will still need the Vcore and Qpi/Vtt to be tuned to each other. On this board they really have to be kept within 0.05V of each other, if you increase the BLk and its unstable use more Vcore like +0.025 and if that doesn't do it, then try the same incremental increase to Qpi/Vtt instead.
This is just a taste of its potential and I'm going to do a second post with exactly what is needed to overclock this board properly, it's quite impressive! It's up now, http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18141065
So essentially just ignore what I told you about overclocking and the values used, just know that it is really good!
Conclusion
Ok so I had a few problems, but I really can't complain about this board and I can't recommend it enough. For the money it's just amazing you get all the features of the higher end boards, the same USB3 and Sata3, and you get CrossfireX and SLI too. It lacks slightly in the cooling and doesn't have the 12 phase power for those super high overclocks, but the money you save will get you a better graphics card or an SSD or something else. To me Overclocking was always about this, bang for your buck and your sure to find it here, with a D0 stepping i7 its just superb.
Last edited: