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It's time to find out how
far the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard can be pushed!
With an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
processor in the AM3 socket, PCSTATS loaded up the BIOS to make changes so
neither the memory or CPU would hold the Gigabyte board from reaching its
maximum motherboard bus speed. To start the Phenom II X4' multiplier was lowered
from 16x to 8x, and the two sticks of
2GB Corsair XMS31600C9 DDR3-1600 memory were set to run in DDR3-800 MHz
mode, this way it won't be holding the CPU back either. AMDs standard AVC Z7U7414001 heatsink was
used and PCSTATS also disabled features like Cool'n'quiet and AMD C1E
support.
With these changes made, PCSTATS started
overclocking the bus speed on the Gigabyte
GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard from 200 MHz. The Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard easily managed a quick
leap from 200MHz up to 250MHz, and then 275MHz, 285MHz, 295MHz and 310MHz.
The system would post at 315MHz bus speed, was wasn't stable in Windows Vista so
we had to settle for a maximum motherboard overclock of 310MHz. Not too bad
at all!
A quick peek into the
BIOS:
The BIOS controls how the motherboard communicates with
all the peripherals connected to it, and is a crucial component for any good
well rounded motherboard. PCSTATS is only going to highlight the tweaking
features so you'll know what to expect.
There aren't many surprises here. The Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P's bios
opens up the most critical overclocking features up, including the
northbridge/Hypertransport frequency, and the overall clock speed. For those who
use Phenom II Black Edition processors, it will also be possible to adjust CPU
multipliers.
The advanced memory screen lets you configure
some of the more exotic memory settings, while memory timings and frequencies
are set on the JumperFree configuration page. Most of these memory settings will
only be used for troubleshooting purposes or to get very exotic memory working
properly on the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P, so most users can safely leave it
alone.
The advanced memory screen lets you
configure some of the more exotic memory settings, while memory timings and
frequencies are set on the main overclocking configuration page. Most of these memory settings will only
be used for troubleshooting purposes or to get very exotic memory working properly
on the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard, so most users can safely leave it
alone.
Advanced Clock Calibration can potentially be
used to turn a triple-core Phenom II x3 720 Black Edition processor into a
quad-core 920 Black Edition processor, by unlocking one of the unused CPU cores.
This feature is still largely experimental, and supposedly works by increasing
the error tolerance on the locked CPU core. Whether this works for you and your
chip will largely depend on blind luck, as only some chips will
actually have usable locked cores.
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