Gigabyte X58A-UD9: A Massive Board for a Massive Score

Overclocking

This motherboard is intended for overclocking purposes, so we naturally did just that. To make things interesting, we plugged in a Core i7 930 processor and installed a heatpipe-tower heatsink, coupled with our usual, 4400 RPM, 12 cm monster fan. The processor was then pushed as far as our air-cooling solution would allow us to. By pumping 1,5V of electricity, we managed to increase the clockspeed to 4410 MHz (210 MHz x 21), a pretty standard fare, but on this motherboard, it’s relatively easy to do.

Okay, so the motherboard barely flexed its muscle. There is still so much potential in it that can be exploited using an extreme cooling solution, like the LN2 (Liquid Nitrogen) for example. Alva Jonathan handles the extreme overclocking session of this motherboard, and you can read his comprehensive report in our site later on.

Testing Platform

Processor: Intel Core i7 930
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD9
Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 480
Memory: 3x1GB Kingston KHX16000D3T1K3/3GX
Harddisk: Western Digital Caviar Black 500 GB (32 MB Cache)
Power Supply: Enermax Revolution 85+ 1050 Watt
Heatsink: Gelid Tranquillo + 12 cm Fan @4400 rpm (for Overcloking)
Monitor: Philips 221E
Input: Genius (Keyboard and Mouse)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit
Driver: NVIDIA Forceware 257.21