| Gigabyte GA EP45 DQ6 Motherboard |
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Gigabyte GA EP45 DQ6 Motherboard
Test Rig
Please note that all these benchmarks are relative and the particular performance aspects will depend more on you CPU/ Graphcis Card/ Memory of your system rather than the motherboard.
Overclocking and 1333+ Challenge
After having this Gigabyte's GA EP45 DQ6 for 2 months now, there is only thing I can conclude about this board that it is highly overclockable and would have been even more so if it had a better memory voltage controller as it is definitely the Achilles heel of this board. It was able to successfully overclock my Q6600 from 2.4 to 3.51 GHz as well as overclock the Kingston 1200 MHz RAM to 1300 MHz which was unachievable on the 680i and the 780i chipsets.
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Stable CPU Overclock |
Stable RAM Overclock |
It also seems that Gigabyte did not fill their web site with false promises. The RAM overclock to 1333 MHz was a success as I was able to load into Windows and take screenshots. The overclock, however, was not stable enough for me to run benchmarks on. Despite having tried different voltages I would always get a blue screen or the computer would lock up and I was forced to restart.
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3.6 GHz
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1333 MHz
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3D Mark Vantage
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3D Mark Vantage Single Card
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3D Mark Vantage CrossFire
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In the results above you can clearly see that there is an obvious advantage in CrossFire vs Single card performance as the Crossfire acheved a 50% increase in score.
PC Mark Vantage
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PC Mark Vantage Single Card
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PC Mark Vantage
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In the PC Mark Vantage test, the the CrossFire results were actually lower than those of the single card. Although there may be several reasons for this, from what I have experienced, the most prominent one, is the instability of RAM as well as the difference between the 16x and the 8x ports on Gigabyte's GA-EP45-DQ6.
REALTIME PRICING
