Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Review

Overclocking & Testing Procedures
Ok let’s get into some overclocking, this is where I ran in to some issues.  At first I did not realize that my CPU was an engineering sample so I really was not able to do much overclocking.  I will however go over the overclocking options you have with the X58-USB3.  Gigabyte includes an excellent piece of software called EasyTune 6 which allows you to overlclock your PC easily.  It includes 3 built in overclocking profiles that you just need to enable and restart your computer.  If you don’t feel like using one of the profiles you can go into the software and adjust the settings and voltages yourself.

Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard

If you still want to go into the BIOS to overclock your system that is easily done in the MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.).  All of the menus are easy to navigate and understand.
For testing we will be running the system at stock speed (2.66GHz) then we turned Intel Turbo Boost on which upped the speed to around 2.8GHz.

We will be running our system through an entire battery of benchmarks, for reference here is our system specs again.

Intel Core i7-920 CPU
Gigabyte X58-USB3 Motherboard
Sparkle Calibre X480 GeForce GTX 480 Video Card
Patriot Viper Xtreme DDR3 6GB Kit
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB 3.5-inch SSD
2 other SATA drives
ASUS DVD Drive
Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W PSU
Corsair Graphite Series 600T Case

Our tests are divided in to 3 different categories.  We have listed each piece of software so you can download it and test your system with it.

CPU Testing
Sisoftware Sandra 2011 (download)
– Processor Arithmetic
– Processor Multimedia
AIDA64 (download)
– CPU Queen
– CPU PhotoWorxx
– CPU ZLib

System Testing
PCMark Vantage (download)
Sisoftware Sandra 2011 (download)
– Memory Bandwidth
– Cache & Memory
– Physical Disks
HDTune Pro (download)

Video Testing
3DMark11 (download)
Heaven Demo 2.1 (download)
Stone Giant Demo (download)

Now on to testing!

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