Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking your CPU means operating your CPU and motherboard outside of their design specifications, it can cause damage to them or kill them and may void their warranties depending on the manufacturer’s policies!
When it comes to Sandy Bridge-E, overclocking can be more exciting than Sandy Bridge and socket 1155. With Sandy Bridge there are two or three settings you have to worry about in order to set your overclocks and other settings did not make a bunch of difference. However, with Socket 2011 you can take the route of Sandy-Bridge or you can venture off and tweak tons of different things. One of the greatest advantages is being able to set multipliers for Base-clock. With Sandy Bridge you are more or less limited to 110-base clock as a maximum. With SB-E you can hit much higher base clock frequencies.
Stock speeds of the 3930K are 3.2ghz, however most boards will run at 3.5ghz since turbo is enabled by default.Thus stock testing was done at 3.5ghz. For most people that would be more than enough, but for others they want the speeds of 4.0ghz and higher.
If I had access to extreme cooling such as Dry Ice or liquid nitrogen I would have posted much higher speeds. But as-is I do not want to kill my processor with excessive voltages.
For this review I stuck to 1.45v as a limit since that is a decent limit for what most people would consider safe for daily clocks. If you have sufficient cooling 1.4v should be fine for daily use, but I would not advise going much over that unless you have heavy-duty cooling.
Keep in mind that every processor is different so if I am able to hit certain clocks that does not mean you will be able to as well even with the same hardware.
CPUz Info
While this board did not do 4.8ghz like the Asrock did, it did however keep the voltage at a constant 1.45v when set at that level in the bios. Testing this with a multimeter resulted in an exact 1.400v which is quite impressive under load.
3Dmark Vantage
A bit over 47000, not too bad at all for 4.7ghz
MaxxMem
For its CPU clock this is not too bad at all. It is a shame that Sandy Bridge-E has added latency compared to Sandy Bridge or it could potentially be extremely fast.
Cinebench 11.5
This board is resulting in some very good efficiency, benchmarkers should love that.
Wprime
These scores are quite fast for 4.7ghz. The GD65 has some solid efficiency compared to other X79 boards.
Memory Overclocking
I tested various types of memory on this board and found that while I was able to hit the same frequencies as I had on other boards, the timings were not quite as tight. But rest assured, no matter which IC your memory has it should work just fine on the X79-GD65 (8D). Hyper MNH-E,Hyper MGH-E, BBSE,HCF0,Powerchip, D9GTR,and Hynix all worked just fine on this board.
