Gigabyte EP45-UD3P

[w2richwood]

good clocking Ross make it look so easy with your magic touch
Rich

 

[Gautam]

Nice stuff Ross, I'll have to go through this in hopes of matching you...

 

[Nebulous]

Dam Ross, you've done it again! A most impressive job indeed

Smokin' clocks on a cheapy board!

 

[Ross]

LOL!!!! You truely are my superhero Ross.....

Excellent work and very detailed walk through of your testing...

Hehehehe. I like prime, really

Ross, I noticed you tuned down the ICH all the way down to 1.1v, is that on auto or did you manually set it that low?

I haven't touched it, it's on AUTO. Actually, I saw someone talking about not being able run more than 1.45V ICH and was like why would anyone turn it up that high? I can't imagine, but I haven't been paying attention if that's maybe a quad thing or what I can't see how that would help anything related to OCing at all.

The VTT/MCH refs in EasyTunes not matching with BIOS is something I wish Gigabyte would address in the next EasyTunes or BIOS update... which one do you think is correct? (The DDR refs/termination don't match either) Here is my non auto settings for 8.5x500 333 latch 5/6 divider using my Kingston HyperX.

I'm not sure which is correct, but as long they are relative, it's annoying, but OK. I usually don't mess with ref's much anyway and it looks like all the "important" voltages (Vc, Vmch, Vddr, etc.) seem to match fine. The most annoying part is using EasyTune to figure things out and then messing in BIOS trying to find what the equivalents are to set them.

Hey Ross, whats the vdroop like on your board? Some of the guys over @ XS are saying Vdroop is more prevalent than on the P5Q series Asus boards.

I don't have load line enabled and from I've seen from others running it on, there is literally 0 droop. I saw a 2 hour OCCT where it didn't come off a perfectly straight line once. With it disabled, it's about the same as the EP45T Extreme (which doesn't have it): undervolts about .05V from what is set in BIOS and then moves maybe .001-.002 from what I've seen so far.

Actually, I just found the review with the Vc charts:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...e-ga-ep45-ud3p-p45-motherboard-review-15.html

good clocking Ross make it look so easy with your magic touch
Rich

Thanks Rich

Nice stuff Ross, I'll have to go through this in hopes of matching you...

Thanks Gautam, I'm sure you'll have no problem with that

Dam Ross, you've done it again! A most impressive job indeed

Smokin' clocks on a cheapy board!

Thanks! Yeah, at these prices, I can replace it every other week for 2 month for what a "overclocking board" costs

 

[sno.lcn]

I'm going to start playing with this board again tomorrow night, gotta do a couple 3D benches (dropped a couple spots at hwbot, gotta take 'em back) and I'll get back on this.


I noticed something cool the other day. On countless motherboards, when I've pulled the heatpipes off, there's such crap contact with the fets that they may as well be bare. Not the case with this board. I pulled it off and replaced it anyway, but still nice to see deep imprints like this for a change

 

[Ross]

Nice I like this board a lot, might actually make a daily rig from it I'd like to get some 3Ds done, but I have to send the GPU WBs back to Dak, so I dunno if I will get any worth posting on hwbot before I pull them Looking forward to seeing yours though Jeremy

 

[jason4207]

Nice memory clocks man! Who needs DDR3 w/ DDR2 at those speeds!

DDR2-1400 at 5-5-5-18 & DDR2-1200 at 4-4-4-12!

Makes me want to see what my 6400 Ballistix will do w/ more juice. I can get 1250 5-5-4-10 pretty easy at 2.3v, but 1275 was barely making it to the desktop. I have to admit I'm a bit scared to go 2.4v...I don't really have any spare sets laying around. I paid $20 for one of these 2x1GB sets...used D9's cost 2-4x that now!

 

[Ross]

The board is great for DDR2 clocks. As I said earlier, I ran a lot of 2.8-2.9V on many different D9s kits back in the day and the only ones that ever died were a set of 6400C3s after a couple of months. 2.4V is almost light duty by comparison for me Everyone has a different comfort level with voltage, but I certainly wouldn't consider 2.3-2.4V impending doom

The Ballistix 8500s are benchable up to about ~685MHz 5-5-5-x with 2.40V, but even another .10V doesn't get them benchable at 700MHz, so unless I *really* want to bench them there for some reason, no point in trying 2.60+ for another 15MHz. They require substantially less for 1300 or under though. 1250-1300 5-5-5-8 benchable is 2.2V tops, 1250 could probably even be less, but I've never tried.

DDR3 does 5-5-5 very well actually Without even insane voltage, decent sticks will do 1400-1500 5-5-5 benchable.

EDIT: I should say, a bit older DDR3 does 5-5-5 very well. Some newer DDR3 ICs seem to be geared for speed at the expense of CAS and some won't run under CAS 6 or 7 at all, but will do 2000+ with ease on lower voltage.

 

[Sgt_Strider]

Anyone here tried populating all of the RAM slots with DIMMS and overclock it? Eventually I would like to get another 2x2GB setup to have 8GB of memory.

 

[Ross]

Yes, but with 4x1GB. The sticks OC just as high as 2. I didn't try for max FSB with 4 sticks, but that same 550FSB range/ratio as above was no problem. I was just messing around and don't think I screened any with 4x1GB in, but I'll check the next time I turn it on.

 

[Deanzo]

Ross, mate, you make that ram speed look easy.
Nice work.

My last set of DDR2 I killed with 2.7volts, and it still wouldn't bench 600..

Giga has really done something right with their fsb and mem clocking of late

 

[Ross]

Yeah, this thing clocks mem awesome I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen any 700FSB benches from one of their boards yet, but that Everest I did, sure was close

Good luck again if you haven't left yet!

 

[w2richwood]

for 125.00 this seem's to be a very good board i paid more for my p5k-p
Rich

 

[wfarid]

hey guys, I'm going to start testing this board and chip tomm. My older PSU was holding the system back (it was an Antec 500 Earthwatts that had been in a fire and somehow survived). I just replaced it with an PCP&C Silencer 750 and I replaced my Radeon 2400 with a 4870. I'll see how far I can push the EO 8500 chip and 8 gigs of GSkill 8500 CL5 ram on stock cooling. Any programs I should be using besides Prime 95 and CPUID?

 

[Albaholic]

Wow this looks like a fun board and a great price too. I wonder how well this thing handles quads

 

[Ross]

hey guys, I'm going to start testing this board and chip tomm. My older PSU was holding the system back (it was an Antec 500 Earthwatts that had been in a fire and somehow survived). I just replaced it with an PCP&C Silencer 750 and I replaced my Radeon 2400 with a 4870. I'll see how far I can push the EO 8500 chip and 8 gigs of GSkill 8500 CL5 ram on stock cooling. Any programs I should be using besides Prime 95 and CPUID?

I downloaded some Windows memstest app because I didn't want to be stuck in DOS the entire time. Seems to work well.

I was playing around with 4x1GB the other night just to see how stable it really is. These sticks (Ballistix 8500s) wouldn't go over 640MHz @ 2.4V in the P5B, they did 700MHz in this board and are rock solid with less than default volts for 600MHz with tight secondaries. I would've let it run longer, but I had better things to do

Wow this looks like a fun board and a great price too. I wonder how well this thing handles quads

This board might be even better for quads than duals...and it's great for duals

 

[wfarid]

so im a bit confused by the memory divider. When I set it to be 1066 (I forget which mem divider i used), the CPU breezed to 3.8 with just minor increases in voltage. But when I bumped it up to make the mem go to 580mhz (which the g.skill is rated to do) and compensated for the voltage (2.5v) a 580mhz fsb and 7 multi (was my reach but even along the way anything over 400 without manually setting the divider caused it not to post) it all got funky and refused to boot. I had to clear the cmos. Any suggestions on the memory divider? Any suggestions for memory timings?

 

[Ross]

Some ratios/straps stop working in spots and you'll need to try another. Sounds odd, but plenty of boards are like that. Strap is usually the problem, but sometimes the strap is OK and the ratio is the issue, so just play around. If you're only at 400FSB, try a tighter strap, like 200 or 266. IIRC, most of the ones I've tried had problems 460-490FSB and where in that range depended on the strap/ratio, but jumping up to booting @ 500FSB got past it. I can use even the 200 strap at 500FSB no problem then. 2.00B or 2.40B is probably what you want for the 525+ range. 400 strap doesn't work past ~580FSB again, but 2.00B goes all the way to 670FSB for me.

One other thing to try is leaving the MCH Strap on AUTO if you aren't and just use the ratio selection to set both ratio/strap in one shot.

 

[El<(')>Maxi]

Finally had a chance to play with this board & some old Tracers. Took a bit of a different direction, testing in Vista w/ wPrime & Everest. This board is pretty crazy clocking ram, I'll try some Cas 4 tomorrow and see about max FSB. This is all on the 266 strap.

Setup
Stock BIOS - F4
Crucial Ballistix Tracer @ 2.4V
CPU & NB H2O cooled

wPrime v1.55


Everest scaling w/PL level - How low can we go?

PL 11


PL10


PL9


PL8

 

[Ross]

I figured I'd give some bench team members something to do (yell at me), so I am posting some Orthos shots and some max mem freqs (so far)

In my defense, I was selling the proc and couldn't remember the exact voltages for the clocks, so I was basically just testing to confirm what I remembered was accurate. This is the proc that Maxi and I used for the Freestyle portion of the GOOC and I am very happy to say that he is the new owner

4GHz stable < 1.20Vc (WC):



Default 3.33GHz @ 1.00Vc (WC). How about those 4x1GB sticks at DDR2-1333 with 2.2V too? UD3P totally rips DDR2



If that's not enough, I'll be going for broke on it with 2 sticks I have higher than this validation for mem in the bag already, but haven't cracked the magic 800MHz...*yet*. Let's just say this is at much less voltage than I am willing to run on them LOL.