Stefan Mileschin

It's been a tough week or so for Gigabyte marketing. It had to admit that quite a few people had burned their motherboards, to which it offered free replacements, and isolated the problem to faulty firmware. There has been talk that this firmware cripples overclocking by throttling CPU clock speed under extreme stress. Gigabyte set out to do some myth-busting. Renowned overclocker and Gigabyte PR guy HiCookie set up a test-bench using Core i7-3930K, an "infamous" X79-UD3 motherboard running the latest version F7 BIOS, and a typical extreme-cooling bench.

HiCookie achieved 5643.2 MHz clock speed, using a base clock of 99 MHz, 57.0x multiplier, and CPU voltage of 1.584V. The rest of the test-bench consisted of Kingston HyperX Genesis memory, and Corsair AX1200W PSU. To demonstrate that this isn't a hit-and-run feat, HiCookie put the overclocked bench through Super Pi 1M and 32M and PiFast benchmarks, with record-setting scores. The CPU-Z validation can be found here. Details of the HWBot record scores can be accessed here.

http://www.techpowerup.com/157725/Gi...w-F7-BIOS.html