Gigabyte's Memory Voltage Cheat

We used two apparently identical Gigabyte GA-1975X motherboards for this project. Both carry revision number 1.0. We flashed the latest BIOS version F4C (03/27/2006) and set the memory voltage to "normal" prior to doing any tests. However, the motherboard that we had used for several Tom's Hardware articles before powered the memory with an increased memory voltage. The reason for doing this is pretty simple: A slightly higher supply voltage helps to achieve faster clock speeds, which shows that Gigabyte had sent in a hand-tuned motherboard for review - for the sake of performing better than the competition. Of course we corrected the memory voltage manually prior to starting the stress test.

This is the "normal" memory voltage of Gigabyte's GA-1975X review sample.

The second motherboard ran at nominal voltage and obviously is not tuned to win comparative roundups.