Return of the X58 - The Best from ASUS and Gigabyte
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Page 11 of 12 - Overclocking
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Overclocking
Overclocking
So what was the maximum stable overclock we got for the entire system? Unlike our usual motherboard testing, where we stopped to find the maximum base clock possible on a board, for this article, we decided to go further to see how far we could push the system in total. The final result turned out to be quite similar on both boards at about 4.5GHz on average. The ASUS emerged slightly better with a higher possible multiplier (135MHz base clock and 33x multiplier) compared to the Gigabyte's 140MHz base clock with a 31x multiplier, not taking in account of Turbo Boost.
Unfortunately, as our graphics benchmarks showed, at our highest game settings, the bottleneck appeared to be the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, as the increase in clock speed yielded practically no benefits at all. Even swapping over from the 5870 to a dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 did not result in any improvement in scores from the overclock.
To confirm that it is indeed a case of GPU limitation, we lowered the settings in Far Cry 2 for one test with the ASUS board (the second graph below) and found that the scores did go up with the overclock, but only at the lower settings/resolution. It goes to show that no matter how many cores you have or how fast the CPU clock, at the highest settings, the graphics card is the decisive factor and there's still plenty of room for improvement for GPUs at this level.
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