GIGABYTE GA-Z68AP-D3 Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅14-10-11
Test Setup & Overclocking

CPU Intel Core i5 2500K (3.3GHz)
Motherboards
- GIGABYTE Z68AP-D3
- ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3
- GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3P
- GIGABYTE G1 Sniper 2
- ASRock Extreme4 Gen3
- MSI Big Bang Marshal
- ASUS Maximus IV Extreme
- GIGABYTE Z68-UD4
- Foxconn Rattler P67
- ASUS Sabertooth P67
- ASUS P8P67 (LGA1155)
- Foxconn P67A-S
- ECS P67H2-A (Black Extreme)

Memory 4GB Kingston HyperX Genesis CL9 1600MHz
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-D14
Graphics ZOTAC GTX 460
PSU OCZ Fatal1ty 750W

All P67 Sandy Bridge motherboards will be benchmarked against each other using the Intel Core i5 2500K. The maximum overclock will also be included within the proceeding benchmark tests to identify performance gains as a result of tweaking CPU clock speed via the multiplier.

Overclocking

As previously mentioned in our Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge Roundup - overclocking is achieved by altering the multiplier rather than the BCLK. So the BCLK stays at 100MHz and the multiplier is modified. So if we have 100MHz on the BCLK and 40 for the multiplier this will obviously output 4GHz. We chose to use the Intel Core i5 2500K across each of the motherboard tests and indeed for the overclocking due to its unlocked multiplier.

With overclocking simplified on Sandy Bridge, this means that achieving the best overclock couldn't be easier. CPU voltage and multiplier just need to be modified accordingly. The ultimate milestone is 5GHz on air cooling for the Intel Core i5 2500K and so I began overclocking – first of all nudging the multiplier up to 46, disabling power saving options and increasing the core voltage to give it headroom. I soon found that 46 – 4.6GHz was stable and so I moved up to 4.8GHz, in similar fashion this was again stable. With a little more confidence I then moved up to 50 – the 5GHz milestone but even with 1.5v running through it failed in the last leg of stress testing. 1.5v is quite a large amount of voltage to be putting through a Sandy Bridge CPU – for a test run to ascertain what the chip is capable of this is fine but for day to day use the chip would not last very long at all.

So with 5GHz being unattainable I dropped down to 49 – 4.9GHz with the voltage of 1.45v which for a low-end budget Z68 motherboard is quite an achievement indeed. Below is the screen capture with LinX stress test.



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