When overclocking, we always start at around 4.6GHz and move up to see how far things can be pushed from there. With that in mind, we wanted to keep the core voltage under 1.4V, ideally with the lower the better and moved our multiplier up to 47, aiming for 4.7GHz which was 100% stable throughout our whole testing suite.
4.8GHz was the next step with thanks for the 48 multiplier, and while half of the benchmarks ran flawlessly, some namely 3DMark11 and Cinebench threw up a hissy fit, showing that the system wasn’t stable. With that in mind, we tinkered a bit more with other various voltage settings to see if we could get things stable, but alas 4.7GHz was our limit on this board.
We did decide to give another crack at it and found that 4.8GHz was achievable but it required much higher voltages and to get it 100% stable, we had to prop up quite a few different fans to bring the temperatures back down which wasn’t an ideal solution, especially if we are looking for a stable 24/7 overclock, whereas 4.7GHz did meet this criteria and that is why we will be testing under that speed throughout the rest of this review.
When I tested this board I was very impressed with it. So much so that I’ve decided to to use this one in my personal rig and the G1 Sniper 5 with my open bench test setup. It makes sense because all my overclocking & testing is done with the open bench setup & my personal gaming rig is boxed up, sitting next to me rocking stock speeds. I’m back to using my old Xonar DS soundcard because IMO it’s still far superior to the Realtek ALC898 and the UD3H incorporates a legacy PCI slot which the Xonar requires.
Yeah, the legacy PSI slot is very helpful for the users who owns older but great soundcards. One of my friends got a Xonar ST and users like him will need a legacy PCI slot in every motherboard they use.
Looks like it’s a fantastic board. And, very good review, Andy. :)
I should mention that the new interface of the BIOS is awesome. We should stop calling that BIOS, It’s not ‘basic’ anymore.