GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 Motherboard Performance Review

Overclocking the GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 Motherboard

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

Overclocking with the new Sandy Bridge processors has been simplified, at least in part. Adjustments to the Bclck have been almost done away with and overclocking is almost completely done through increasing the multiplier. When overclocking we used to run out of room on the Bclck or cooling. Now we are going to be limited by the Multi-wall. The Sandy Bridge processor just isn’t capable of going any faster; it’s all dependent on the piece of silicone that you get when you purchase your processor.

The Intel Core i5 2500K utilizes a bus speed of 100MHz, though the GIGABYTE P67A-UD4 is picking it up at 99.8MHz. Under full load the Intel Core i5 2500K uses a multiplier of x33 to achieve the final clock speed of 3.3GHz. Since we are using a K series processor which has an unlocked multiplier we will be able to increase the default x33 multiplier to achieve our overclock today.

Despite my hopes and dreams I wasn’t able to get any more out of this chip today than what you see above. I was really hoping to be able to achieve stability over 5GHz, but it wasn’t meant to be today. I was able to boot into Windows with a multiplier of x51; I just wasn’t able to achieve any kind of stability at x51 or x50. Our system temperatures were reading well below the limits of the chip, I just wasn’t comfortable pushing much beyond the 1.525V I was already at on air cooling. When it comes down to it though, our 4963 MHz overclock was rock solid! The 1.7GHz overclock was easy to achieve with very few changes in the BIOS. We had the Internal CPU PLL Overvoltage set to enable, Load-Line Calibration set to enable, and the CPU Vcore set to 1.5V. The multiplier was set to x49 and the BCLK was increased to 101.3.