Overclocking Specifics

Just like during work in nominal mode, we didn’t experience any serious problems during CPU and memory overclocking on Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R mainboard. However, the mainboard does have a few peculiarities, which we should point out here.

At first we found out that this mainboard guaranteed memory modules stability at their nominal frequency of 1867 MHz. However, besides increasing the memory voltage to 1.65 V, we also had to increase to 1.415 V the QPI/VTT Voltage of the UnCore part of the North Bridge integrated into the CPU. It is a relatively high setting. After that, when we lowered the processor clock frequency multiplier, we confirmed that Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R, just like all other quality mainboards, allows increasing base frequency from 133 to 215 MHz. This is a very good result. After that all we had to do was check if the mainboard could provide the most optimal overclocking mode for our system. In this case we increased the base frequency to 181 MHz. taking into account that Intel Turbo Boost technology increased the processor clock multiplier to 21x, the resulting CPU frequency was 3.8GHz. The memory in this case had to work at 1810 MHz with 8-8-8-22-1T timings. No problem, all performance and stability tests were passed with flying colors.

This overclocking didn’t even require increasing the CPU Vcore, we just had to enable ‘Load-Line Calibration” that prevents the processor core voltage from dropping under heavy load – VDroop. As you can see, the voltage is 1.216 V, which is very close to the nominal setting for our processor sample of 1.225 V. Unlike many other mainboards, Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R doesn’t increase the processor Vcore when VDroop protection is enabled. Due to the fact that processor core voltage wasn’t increasing, all Intel power-saving technologies remained up and running at full swing. In idle mode the clock frequency multiplier and processor core voltage were lowered.

Things looked nearly ideal, but this is when we suddenly uncovered one very unpleasant thing about Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R mainboard: it refused to “cold start”. The mainboard successfully passed all tests and checks, turned off and on, but only if it received the power. Once the board was completely disconnected from the power source even for a few seconds, it immediately refused to start. It did undertake a few vain attempts to boot and then started in safe mode displaying the corresponding warning message on the startup screen.

Formally, you don’t need to take any measures, just enter the BIOS and confirm the saved overclocked settings without changing anything. The board will continue to work just fine, but again until the power is fully disconnected. The need for these additional actions, such as accessing the BIOS and confirming the parameter settings on every system boot-up, makes it considerably less comfortable to work and spoils the joy from overclocking achievements.

We have already come across mainboards acting like that and in most cases it was enough to lower the overclocking parameters just a little to fix the situation. So, we lowered the base frequency from 181 to 170 MHz, then to 150 and 140 MHz, but the board still didn’t start. The system refused to boot even when we set the base frequency to the nominal value of 133 MHz. So, it looks like CPU overclocking actually has nothing to do with it, so maybe we have to lower the memory frequency? Nope, even at 1067 MHz memory frequency the board refused to boot. Lowering the memory voltage also didn’t help. It turned out that the problem was in the excessively high “QPI/VTT Voltage. As we found out, the board booted just fine at 1.355 V, but as soon as we set this voltage to 1.375 V or higher, it doesn’t want to boot anymore. Unfortunately, we had to increase QPI/VTT Voltage to 1.415 V to ensure that our memory modules could run at high frequencies, which resulted in failure to cold start.

This is a pretty complicated situation. On the one hand, we don’t want to sacrifice high memory frequency just for the sake of convenience, but on the other, we don’t feel like performing a bunch of extra moves on every boot-up, virtually patting the mainboard on the shoulder and saying “go on, overclock just like I told you before”. Of course, had our memory been working on a bit lower frequency, we may have not noticed this issue at all, but now it is obvious that the owners of high-frequency memory modules should keep in mind the existence of these complications. It is a real shame that this little drop spoilt the so far impeccable image of Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R mainboard. The table below will sum up everything we know about the overclocking peculiarities on Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R mainboard: