How is the included OC utility with Gigabyte boards?

I guess it depends on what you want in the end!

P5k-e wifi = 150$
q6600 = 225$
PC 800 decent ram = 100$
TRUE = 60$ + 10 for a fan!

So thats a quad at 3.6 all day long! (Get an OEM processor if you have the chance! There is one single person that I have seen here who cant get 3.6 out of his q6600, only 3.5!)

Then again, I have 7 q6600's and every one of them can reach 3.6.

I suppose you can get the new dual and hit 4.0! But hey, quad all the way, baby!

The p5k-e is non SLI, but you can at least get a 475 FSB out of it easily. Maybe 500!

FSB up, lol, well yeah! FSB X CPU multiplier = CPU frequency.

Memory timings reduce the cycle time of the RAM, and can make up for slower over all frequencies. (800 Mhz 4-4-4-12 might be close to 5-5-5-15 @ 900 Mhz.)

You want the lowest VCore possible and still remain stable while testing for at least 8 hours. While its true you will almost never see a load in real life equal to Prime 95s small ffts, you still want it stable, right?

So the lower the VCore, the less voltage and lower the temps.

Auto settings or automatic OC thingies tend to over volt your gear a bit. So the old fashioned way works best!

Casual indeed!

Flame on!

--Lupi

i have gigabyte x38. i just oc using bios never bothered with software. got e8400 to 3.8 with barely an increase in vcore. somwhere around 1.3 i think.

To answer the OP's main question simply: the included OC utility is great! At least, on my board. I can't speak for the others, but I suspect the newer gigabyte boards have the same easytune utility and the same bios functionality.

And if you want a little more info ...
First off, I've OC'ed everything I've owned for many years now. I'm used to doing the manual tweaking in the bios, and that's easy enough that you shouldn't shy away from it. However, on my gigabyte 965p ds3 board, the bios has a GREAT utility for OCing that I used for a long time. It essentially OC's the fsb (affecting memory and the cpu) by up to around 33% (not sure exactly) when the CPU is under heavy use. For quite a while, I had my c2d chip undervolted AND set to auto-OC when under load from 1.8 to around 2.2 ghz. I did some tests to confirm that there were actual power savings to be had over the normal method of OCing these chips (disabling the power saving features of the c2d chip and setting the fsb and multiplier to a set level) while still supplying the performance boost.

Right now, I have my C2D manually OC'd from 1.8 to 2.8, but I'm very tempted to go back to using the "full throttle" autoOverClock function in the bios (no software needed, for the record, though there is a software package that duplicates the bios functionality from within the windows environment). Laziness is all that has prevented me from going back to using Gigabytes bios utility, as I could have the same performance (when needed) with less heat (when idling) and less power usage overall.

Thanks guys!

Basically, I use overclocking to get the free and easy performance that some of this hardware has. The E8400 is 3.0GHz., and 3.6GHz. (or 20%) is free and easy (I will have a very good cooler).

I use the x38 board, and that "utility" seems pretty bad. Q6600 unstable at 3ghz. I manually oced later to 4ghz 1hr prime95 stable.

Well, for the casual OCer, I suppose driver level OCing is fine, but I highly recommend OCing through the bios. There's less issues to deal with, normally.

On my Asus, the OC utility is in BIOS, I can select 5, 10, 20, or 30% and it does the rest.

How does the Gigabyte work?

Also, I thought some software utilities could actually access and change BIOS while in Window's (just for the OC part).

If you're talking about the automatic OCing function in the Gigabyte bios, it's pretty much the same as the ASUS. I think it only goes up to 20 % though.

Use the BIOS. Always works, more control, and no software limitations.

Limited knowledge + patience + good temperature monitoring= above average OCing in BIOS.

Software based OCing = crap