Manual Overclocking And EasyTune6
We carried forward the 4.68 GHz overclock shown in the BIOS screenshots of Gigabyte’s Z68XP-UD5, including the 1.35 V core and Level 6 Load-Line setting that was required to reach an actual 1.35 V under load. Note that this particular motherboard does not facilitate proper voltage readings in CPU-Z.
Solid memory overclocking capability let us use XMP-2200 values in spite of the CPU’s increased 101.6 MHz BCLK, resulting in a DDR3-2168 data rate at CAS 9.
EasyTune6 jumps over several settings compared to Gigabyte's BIOS, so we couldn’t select 101.6 MHz, and 101.8 MHz caused the system to crash.
Similarly, the 45x CPU multiplier wasn’t selectable, and the system wasn’t stable with EasyTune6 set to 46x. The combination of missing settings and inferior stability caused EasyTune6 to fall around 200 MHz short of our BIOS-based overclock, again compelling us to dial in our favorite settings that way.
CPU Vcore also jumped from 1.345 V to 1.355 V. We selected 1.345 V because we were comparing a 1.350 V BIOS-based overclock, which could explain our CPU’s inability to reach 46x using Gigabyte's software.