For this review I’ve decided to test this board’s performance with an FSB hungry quad core CPU. High FSB on a quad is much more demanding of a board than a dual core; FSB speeds over 500 mhz are hard to achieve on any board, so hopefully this board will be able to show us some record highs, and reasonable stability for those with locked multiplier quads who want to push high 24/7 clocks.

We’ll be looking for a few different kinds of cpu clocks here: 24/7 stable overclocks, max 3D benchable, max 2D benchable, and max validate. 24/7 stability will be assessed by 10 passes of AgentGOD’s IBT linpack testing at reasonable voltages, our standard for 3D benching will be 3DMark Vantage as its cpu test is the most stressful of the 3DMark series, our standard for 2D benchable will be any of the prominent cpu math tests including SuperPi 1M, 32M, Hexus Pifast, and wPrime v2.0, and max validation will be simply a mad dash for the highest speed that can be CPU-Z validated at any suicidal voltages necessary. These tests will be done at whatever FSB:DRAM ratio works, with whatever ram speeds and timings work. XP pro will be used for 2D benching and max validate while Vista will be used for 3DMark Vantage and 24/7 stability testing.

RAM clocking will be a bit simpler; we will look for max 24/7 stable bandwidth measured by Lavalys Everest and stability tested by the same standards as above as well as max DRAM clock (this has absolutely nothing to do with Gigabyte’s DDR2 speed competition).

All settings will be fully disclosed using Gigabyte’s Easy Tuner 6 utility to display voltages and any other means for other pertinent settings.