Overclocking

We installed our Core 2 Duo E8500 ‘Wolfdale’ chip for some front side bus overclocking – this same chip did 543MHz on the XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI board so we know it should stretch the Gigabyte X48. We found we could get the CPU to boot and load Windows at 535MHz FSB, but it wasn't stable until we dropped it down to 515MHz FSB. This is still a good result, but the XFX is clearly better at achieving high FSB speeds.

Overclocking the same chip again, but this time to see where the CPU overhead lay we managed a solid 4.25GHz at 9.5x 447MHz FSB. Again, while not record breaking for us, this was an excellent result. We then swapped out the dual-core for a quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX9650 but unfortunately had respectively less fun playing with this – we only managed 475MHz FSB and 3.9GHz out of it. We don't expect 500MHz+, but we have had better results than these on other boards in the past. The Gigabyte should handle quad-core processors better with twelve phases of CPU power regulation, although it doesn't seem to quite excel itself here.

One thing we found during our escapades was that the north bridge voltage has a significant overhead, however as we dove into it the passively cooled heatpipes got very, very hot without extra cooling. It's best to throw a fan or two over it to help keep everything stable, but we'd also like to see the option of an additional fan bundled by Gigabyte that specifically fits onto the north bridge.

Power Consumption

As usual, we dropped in a specific G0 stepping Core 2 Duo E6750, GeForce 8800 GT and 2GB of memory for our power consumption testing. We set the BIOS back to its optimised default settings and also enabled Intel's EIST and C1E states.

The Gigabyte board features its new Dynamic Energy Saver hardware and software – the Windows software controls its twelve phase PWM system with a particularly fine grain that raises or drops the phase use two at a time depending on CPU load, in order to maximise efficiency. We've investigated the system before, although with only six phases used, on the GA-EP35-DS4.


The DES software on the X48T-DQ6 provides a massive improvement – far better than what we saw with the EP35-DS4 which only features six phase power. This is partly because when using a dual-core CPU, the DES software limits the phase use to just six out of twelve for best efficiency – that equates to a 20W saving at full load and a few watts at idle.

For a high-end chipset, the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 uses less power than all the other P35 and X38 boards features – this is an excellent result.