BIOS

GIGABYE has gone with its familiar Award Blue screen BIOS that has served us quite well, it's easy to navigate and has been the same design style for over 10 years. It works and makes referencing easier to do than some of the other BIOS setups out there. To gain access to the overclocking / tweaking options you need to go to the MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) menu.

Buses

Host Frequency: 100MHz to 700 MHz in 1MHz increments

PCI Express Frequency: 100MHz to 150MHz in 1MHz increments

Voltages

DDR2 OverVoltage Control: +0.05v to +2.55v in 0.05v increments

PCI-E OverVoltage Control: +0.05v to 0.35v in 0.05v increments

FSB OverVoltage Control: +0.05v to +0.35v in 0.05v increments

(G)MCH OverVoltage Control: +0.025v to 0.375v in 0.025v increments

CPU OverVoltage Control: 0.83125v to 2.35000v in 0.00125v increments

Overclocking

In our overclocking tests we did a double whammy but for reality sakes we only included one set of overclocking results in our tests. We tested the board using the DES both enabled and disabled. With DES enabled our overclocking limited us to just over 502MHz FSB; this is where we found instabilities when the CPU wanted to rush to full speed, the voltages just weren't stable enough to handle this with the DES enabled.

Running with the DES system disabled we managed to get 545MHz out of the board which was a lot better than our X38-DQ6 using DDR2 memory. It seems Intel has done a good job picking these chipsets from the batches.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.