Gigabyte X58A UD3R V2 Review

Test Setup

Gigabyte X58A UD3R v2
Intel Core-i7 950
6GB Mushkin Redline RAM
Corsair AX1200 PSU
Noctua NH-D14
ASUS HD5870
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

With the Gigabyte nicely positioned at the entry-level enthusiast end of the market with a £150 price tag to match, it only made sense to put it up against our most recent £150 X58 motherboard, the ASUS Sabertooth.

Overclocking

So how does the updated UD3R perform? Starting with the BCLK we managed to achieve 218 MHz which is higher than the Sabertooth we’re up against and the original UD3 too.

  

With a serious step-up in Core voltage that is easily achievable with the more stable power circuitry on the v2 revision of the UD3R we managed to get the system bootable at 4.6GHz. Of course we wouldn’t want to run at this voltage as a 24/7 overclock so we dropped the voltage back to 1.4 and the CPU to 4.4GHz for our testing. Speaking of which…