BIOS

The X58-USB3 has the same BIOS that we all have come to love from GIGABYTE. For the overclocker you will want to start off in the MIT pages. MIT for those of you that do not know stands for Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker.

GB has broken the major functions down into separate pages. On one hand this makes things easy to navigate, while on the other you have to visit multiple places just to get things done.

The Advanced Frequency Page is well laid out and easy to move around. It does include some settings that are available on a few other pages, but that is ok as it prevents you from having to hunt around for all of the basic OC tools.

Here we find one of those settings that is in multiple places. The memory multiplier is here as well as in the Advanced Frequency page. No big deal as any changes made here are reflected on the other.

The voltage page is pretty simple, nothing unusual here…

The rest of the BIOS is fairly typical for an X58 board.

Even the PC Health page is not much different.

Overclocking

When I first took a look at the power regulation on the X58-USB3, I was concerned that I would run into some issues pushing the 980X CPU that I use for testing. After all, the limited voltage regulators, chokes and other items usually associated with good voltage regulation were in short supply. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how well this board overclocked; I found that I was able to push pretty hard and was able to hit a high of 4.343 GHZ (167x26).

You can see the CPUz validation here.

EasyTune 6

We have talked about this overclocking/monitoring software on multiple occasions. It is functional and has some nice add-on features, but not many changes from install to install. We will cover some of the highlights and let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

The Two CPU-Z like pages are nice to get a quick look at what you are getting for overclock speeds, but if you are serious you are still going to end up using CPU-Z in the end.

The Tuner pages have some interesting features even for those that might be very new to overclocking.

GB has included tools for everyone from beginner to expert.

You even have the option to tweak your GPU (at least most of the time).

You also have a few options to adjust/monitor fan profiles along with temperatures and voltages.

As all overclocking results are dependent on the hardware you use, your results may vary. Results of our overclocking tests are included in the performance section with the stock scores.

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.