Overclocking

Overclocking experiments on Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P were an extremely intriguing part of our test session, because they were the ones to confirm or deny if this inexpensive, but very promising mainboard could be considered a good choice for an enthusiast.

First of all we tried to determine the maximum clock generator frequency at which the mainboard remained stable. The mainboard reaction to the clock generator frequency increase turned out not what we expected it to be. The strange thing was that right away we could only set the clock gen frequency no higher than 250-260 MHz, otherwise the mainboard wouldn’t start. However, once the system has rebooted successfully at least once at 260 MHz clock generator frequency, we can continue overclocking and the board will show way higher results without any problems.

So, upon completion of this two-step overclocking procedure we managed to reach pretty good results. Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P remained stable at the clock generator frequency of 330 MHz.

To ensure system stability at this frequency we had to increase the chipset North Bridge voltage by 0.1 V. However, no further voltage increase could help us get past this frequency. And the reason is definitely not the insufficient chipset cooling, because even when we replaced the default chipset heatsink with doubtful efficiency with a much better performing XIGMATEK Porter CN881, we still couldn’t get past 330-MHz mark. So, the real reason for the board’s inability to exceed 330 MHz clock generator frequency must be connected with the limitations in the AMD 770 chipset used for GA-MA770T-UD3P. And that seems to be the biggest imperfection of this board from the overclocking prospective.

Although, it is also important to understand that the existing potential is more than sufficient for regular (non-extreme) CPU overclocking of Phenom II and Athlon II processors that doesn’t involve any extraordinary cooling solutions. The existing Socket AM3 processors all use pretty high multipliers. For example, our test Phenom II X2 550 could easily be overclocked to 3.8 GHz without touching the multiplier.

To ensure system stability at this frequency we increased the processor Vcore by 0.2 V and the voltage of the North Bridge integrated into the processor – by 0.1 V. other voltages remained at their nominal values. By the way, it was especially nice to see that overclocking without changing the multiplier didn’t shut down Cool’n’Quiet processor power-saving technology. When the CPU usage was not too high, the board continued to lower its multiplier and Vcore settings.

Unlocking disabled cores also didn’t cause any problems. When the EC Firmware Selection is set to Hybrid and you enable ACC technology in the mainboard BIOS Setup, the dual-core Phenom II X2 magically turns into a quad-core CPU. And this processor works flawlessly not only in nominal mode but also during overclocking.

However, I have to remind you that this magic is only possible if the semiconductor die of your particular processor has no physical defects, which is not very probable. But if you are lucky, Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P won’t prevent you from using the “hidden CPU resources”.