Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

Gigabyte uses the Phoenix Award BIOS found on most motherboards on the market today with a few modifications for overclocking and is very similar to the older X38 board I reviewed a few weeks ago with a few modifications due to DDR2 being used instead of DDR3 on the GA-X38-DQ6. The overclocking settings are in the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker menu of the BIOS.

Here’s a list of the available settings for the overclocking:

• FSB settings 100MHz to 700MHz
• DDR2 Settings: Auto, 2.0, 2.4, 2.5, 2.66, 3.0, 3.2, 3.33, 4.0 (FSB Strap Dependent)
• PCIe Settings: 90MHz to 150MHz
• CPU Voltage Settings: 0.51250V to 1.60000V (in 0.00625V steps), 1.60V to 2.35 (in 0.05V steps)
• Memory Voltage Settings: +0.05V to +1.55V (in 0.05V steps)
• PCIe Voltage Settings: +0.05V to +0.75V (in 0.05V steps)
• MCH Voltage Settings: +0.025V to +0.375V (in 0.025V steps)
• FSB Voltage Settings: +0.05V to +0.35V (in 0.05V steps)
• Multiplier Selection: Yes (unlocked CPUs only)

FSB settings of up to 700MHz means that there’s plenty of headroom on the board for overclocking the CPU, memory and PCI Express bus frequencies if they can handle it. The range of voltages is also quite large allowing the end-user to change the voltage settings with ease.

Overclocked

Using air cooling I was able to overclock the E6750 to 3.104GHz from the 2.68GHz that the CPU was set to at default. A FSB of 388MHz without changing the voltage or cooling is pretty good but not spectacular. By using the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker I was able to set the FSB to 400MHz in the BIOS Setup without problems.

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