BIOS

GIGABYTE's X38T-DQ6 BIOS is identical to all of their previous DQ6 BIOS setups using the Award 6.0 system which has served its purpose for quite some time. With the announcement of MSI going with their new EFI setup now, we can only hope GIGABYTE has something in the works here too. The MB Intelligent Tweaker(M.I.T) menu has all of the overclocking options within it.

Buses

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

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

Voltages

DDR3 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

Our overclocking experience was quite good considering the X38's less than stellar track record with overclocking. Using the F5 BIOS we were provided by GIGABYTE we managed to push our less than impressive 511MHz clock we were getting right up to 532MHz which is the wall we hit; no matter how much voltage or tweaking we used, pushing for another 1MHz over this would result in a no boot, no win situation.

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.