Overclocking

As you know from our previous reviews, iP965 based mainboards have proudly held the title of the best platform for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme overclocking. They guaranteed the best overclocking results, without any sophisticated manipulations. Therefore, we would expect Intel P35 based solutions to prove pretty overclocking-friendly also, especially since they officially support 1333MHz bus. Therefore, we decided to pay special attention to overclocking experiments on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R.

For our tests we assembled a system on our mainboard with Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor. Besides we also used 2GB of Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D DDR2 SDRAM, PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB graphics card, Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD HDD and SilverStone SST-ST85ZF PSU. Thanks to the memory that can run at up to 1250MHz frequency, we didn’t have to worry about its overclocking potential when clocking it synchronously with the FSB bus and setting the timings to 5-5-5-15. Processor was cooled with Zalman CNPS-9700LED cooler. We didn’t install any additional fans on top of the North Bridge heatsink, because it didn’t warm up too much, even during overclocking. The system stability during overclocking was checked with the well-known ORTHOS utility based on Prime95 code.

We managed to find rather quickly the maximum bus frequency that didn’t cause any mainboard stability issues. Mostly, because Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R is very simple to handle during overclocking. To achieve the maximum result we didn’t even have to touch the chipset voltage.

In other words, you can hit pretty good overclocking results on Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R by simply changing the bus frequency and raising the Vcore and Vmem. This way we managed to reach 505MHz bus frequency.

And this is what the BIOS Setup settings looked like to ensure that the mainboard would run stably at this speed:

Unfortunately, we couldn’t check the system performance at higher frequencies, because our CPU couldn’t get beyond 505MHz FSB – it is its FSB Wall. That is why we assume that Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R can do even better than that with different processor samples. Especially, since some users report successful overclocking attempts hitting much higher frequencies.

However, we have also revealed some issues during our experiments. It turned out that Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard that offers excellent CPU overclocking can’t boast the same success when it comes to memory overclocking. We discovered this when trying to set memory frequency at 1250MHz, which is the nominal speed for Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D. None of the dividers from the mainboard’s supported list could ensure stable memory performance at this speed. The maximum memory bus frequency when our system retained stability was only 1150MHz.

To be fair, I have to say that DDR2 SDRAM working at such high speeds is very rarely used even in overclocker systems. Therefore, this issue is not a big one. All in all, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R proved very well suited for successful overclocking.