Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 Motherboard Review

I’ve had some interesting boards cross the test bench in my time here at the [H], but the X48T-DQ6 holds a candle to almost none of them. This board was probably the most challenging overclock I’ve come across, in that the board itself fought me tooth and nail with even minimal FSB overages. With this board, I attempt to overclock both an Intel E8500 and an Intel E6300 CPU. Believe it or not, the E6300 CPU, which I have personally seen go above the 500 MHz FSB mark, would not overclock one iota on this board. I took it as low as a 300MHz FSB without luck. The E8500 CPU though seemed to do the trick. I’ve had no luck with this CPU in the past overclocking-wise, but with this board, took it to a 450 MHz FSB with a 1500 MHz memory speed. This resulted in a clock speed of 4.275 GHz, which is not too shabby for a 3.1 GHz proc. The processor did boot at a 475 MHz FSB, but was far from stable. The 1500 MHz memory speed was the fastest the board could do, with any higher settings resulting in a non-booting system. To stabilize the board, I used the following voltage settings: CPU at 1.45V, Northbridge at +.30V, CPU bus at +.35V, Southbridge at +.30V, and memory at +.50V. As for the memory timing settings, the board was not stable while overclocked unless the memory timing settings were set for automatic configuration.