GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R (Rev. 2.0) Motherboard Review

Overclocking the GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R (Rev. 2.0)

Judging on looks and features alone, the GIGABYTE X58A-UD3R has great potential to be a nice overclocker. While I am no expert at it, I’m no novice at overclocking either. Also, remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same.

Honestly, as easy as it is to overclock a CPU on this board, it left me wanting more. As far as stability goes, anything over 180 on the BCLK was a no-go when booting into Windows. Raising voltages didn’t do the trick either. I even tried lowering the memory speeds at 200 on the BCLK but to no avail I couldn’t get it to be stable.

I will give it the benefit of the doubt that the reason I couldn’t go beyond a stable 3.4 Ghz could be that I’m using the C0 stepping of the i7 920 CPU which has been known to be a little finicky or it could maybe even the review sample of the GIGABYTE X58A-UD3R we were given. 3.6 Ghz was do-able but oddly wasn’t completely stable on the X58A-UD3R. For a $200 motherboard, 800 Mhz is not a bad overclock at all but I can’t say I wasn’t able to boot into Windows at higher speeds on the Rampage II Extreme with the same CPU.