Overclocking Intel's Core i5 750

Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4

Featured BIOS Verison: F3
UK Price: £117.16 (inc. VAT)
US Price: $149.99 (ex. Tax)


Under the Gigabyte MB Intelligent Setting, Advanced Frequency Settings submenu, we will show in our GA-P55M-UD4 article, a base clock of 202MHz was completely benchmark friendly, however we did drop the memory speed down a notch to compensate. Gigabyte's default setting for the PCI-Express clock drive is 900mV, 100mV more than Asus for its motherboards, although we increased the CPU clock drive to 900mV to match. The QPI link speed is the lower 6.4GHz, and Gigabyte even helpfully allows us to keep an eye on the CPU Uncore frequency too. The Advanced CPU core features sub-menu sees similar disabling of power saving states.


Under the Advanced Memory Settings we recommend reducing the performance enhance to standard to aid overclocking stability, although try and see if Turbo or Extreme works for you. The "Quick" DRAM timings means that one setting changes both channels, which saves time and going through several more sub-menus. The memory timings can then be changed in the Timing Settings submenu below. Again, the vast majority of people will want to leave the Channel Interleaving, Rank Interleaving and Turnaround settings as Auto.

The voltage settings are nice and fine and mirror the Asus and MSI boards to what's available. Load Line Calibration has two levels - for the heavier overclocks we recommend Level 2 but check as you go. Since Gigabyte don't over manual voltage checkpoints like MSI, this leaves us to use more inaccurate software tools like CPU-Z to watch real-time voltages between CPU idle and load.


Setting the HPET Mode to 64-bit is specifically more appropriate for 64-bit OS' and needs to be manually changed because the default is 32-bit, as does the SATA mode to ACHI if you want. Gigabyte prompt this change anyway if it's not already set.


Under the F11 and F12 keys is the ability to save and load up to eight profiles, and it's a good idea to make use of the MIT Current Status to know where the CPU and subsystems are currently clocked to. No matter what kind of changes are applied in the BIOS - until they are saved this screen acts as a reference to what is currently running.

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5

Featured BIOS Verison: F3
UK Price: £160.48 (inc .VAT)
US Price: $219.99 (ex. Tax)


The UD5 BIOS is almost identical to the UD4, the only difference being that we stretched 213MHz using the settings shown below: a bit more CPU, VTT and memory voltage like usual.