Overclocking

The BIOS Setup of Gigabyte P35C-DS3R mainboard contains all options required for successful processor overclocking. The supported frequency and voltage ranges are big enough to cause no problems. Theoretically. To find out what the situation looks like in reality, we need to perform some experiments first.

The test platform we used for our overclocking experiments with Gigabyte P35C-DS3R mainboard was built with 2GB DDR3 SDRAM (Kingston KHX11000D3LLK2/2G), OCZ GeForce 8800GTX graphics card, Western Digital Raptor WD1500AHFD hard disk drive and SilverStone SST-ST85ZF power supply unit. The processor was cooled with Scythe Infinity cooler equipped with two fans rotating at 1800RPM.

First of all we decided to find the maximum FSB frequency when our mainboard remained stable and reliable. The system was running with Core 2 Duo E6850 processor. To test the system stability we ran Prime95 25.3 in Large FFT and Blend modes for 30 minutes.

Our experiments showed that up until 540MHz FSB frequency the mainboard remained absolutely stable. Unfortunately, we cannot say if this frequency is the maximum limit that Gigabyte P35C-DS3R can handle, because 540MHz is the FSB Wall of our test processor.

I have to stress that we only had to increase the North Bridge voltage by 0.2V to obtain this result. All other voltage remained at their default settings.

After the latest Intel price drop, mainboard features for successful quad-core processor overclocking became even more acute. We couldn?t disregard this matter and performed additional overclocking tests with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor. The main goal was again to find the maximum FSB frequency when Gigabyte P35C-DS3R mainboard would remain stable.

As you probably know, contemporary mainboards cope with quad-core processor overclocking much less successful than with dual-core ones. We saw the same during our tests as well. The maximum FSB frequency when Gigabyte P35C-DS3R could work flawlessly with the quad-core CPU was only 455MHz.

To ensure system stability at the speeds shown on the screenshot above, we had to raise the voltage on the chipset North and South Bridges and FSB bus to the maximum: by 0.3V. Besides, we have installed additional 40mm fan on top pf the North Bridge heatsink: without the fan the chip was heating up to scary temperatures.

So, we have every right to state that Gigabyte P35C-DS3R is very good with dual-core as well as quad-core processors overclocking. It proves as efficient as the mainboards from the higher price range.

But let?s check out memory overclocking. Since Gigabyte P35C-DS3R supports both: DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM, the memory overclocking efficiency may have suffered.

Unfortunately, at the time of tests we didn?t have high-frequency DDR3 SDRAM modules in our lab. The Kingston KHX11000D3LLK2/2G modules designed to work at 1375MHz overclocked to 1428MHz, the same result we obtained on Asus P5K3 Deluxe before. The memory voltage in this case was set 0.3V higher and the timings were at 7-7-7-20.

However, DDR2 SDRAM overclocking wasn?t as successful. Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D kit with 1250MHz default frequency could only work stably on Gigabyte P35C-DS3R at 1100MHz. Even maximum possible memory voltage didn?t help. So, it turns out that this mainboard can only work with high-speed DDR3 SDRAM.