Intel i7 3960X EE / Gigabyte GA X79 UD3 / 16GB GSkill Ripjaws Z (2133mhz) Review

Gigabyte have just released their new ‘3D Bios' interface (with American Megatrends) which is patent pending. It allows the user to click on specific parts of the 3D image on the screen to adjust relevant settings.

There are a variety of settings with straightforward sliders, all accessible with the mouse pointer.

Gigabyte also allow for a ‘traditional' style interface system which will suit the older audience (like me) better. I wouldn't say I disliked the new interface, but I prefer having everything in easy to see, text based pages.

The M.I.T. section allows for access to voltage, frequencies and power settings. I have to say that while everything worked fine, I was more at home with the ASUS X79 bios configurations. The Asus Rampage IV Extreme has one of the most intuitive, fully featured bioses I have seen to date.

The ‘BIOS Features' section has all of the settings for configuring the boot menu and hard drive/optical priorities.

The Peripherals panel allows for control over USB, SATA and legacy support. Once configured it will unlikely be touched again.

The Power Management panel lets the user configure power by keyboard, and resume terms.

I didn't find the Gigabyte GA X79 UD3 as easy to overclock as the Asus P9X79 Deluxe or Asus Rampage IV Extreme. For this article we are focusing on a different style of overclocking … without increasing core voltage. That said, I do want to report my findings when I pushed the board as hard as possible.

We achieved a 4.6ghz setting, but it took me around half an hour to get the perfect settings for this specific CPU. The Asus Rampage IV Extreme on the other hand was configured within the space of a few minutes, holding stability with a wider variance of settings. We would assume this is because of an early bios but didn't receive a newer one before going live. Sometimes voltages would ‘reset' to default indicating some potential early bios issues.

4.5ghz was easier, requiring less tweaking with the power settings. We weren't able to get this board stable at the same speeds we did with both ASUS boards.

Getting the GSKILL memory stable at 2133mhz was not a problem, the Gigabyte motherboard detected the profile and configured everything automatically.

As mentioned, for the purposes of this review we are running the system at 4.2ghz, with default voltages. This is a good figure to achieve as it doesn't require hard core cooling, while offering a solid boost over the reference clocks. If you bought the Gigabyte GA X79 UD3 motherboard – achieving a 4.2ghz overclock (900mhz) from the Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition is as easy as changing the clock ratio from 33 to 42.

Strangely enough, CPU Z validator wouldn't validate the default core clock settings, with power saving enabled.

Unsurprisingly, it wouldn't validate our 4.2ghz settings either, even though the system was perfectly stable.

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