High-End Chipset Battle

Intel X48 Overclocking

You’ll notice that the X48 screenshots were made with a Core 2 Duo QX6850 processor (Kentsfield quad core) instead of the Core 2 Duo E8500 (Wolfdale dual core) we used on the nForce 790i Ultra SLI. We used the Core 2 Duo E8500 on both platforms first, but when reaching the limits on the X48 motherboard we found that the E8500 turned into a bottleneck. The QX6850 proved to be the better choice, but it didn’t allow for better results on the Asus Striker II Extreme and the nForce 790i Ultra SLI either.

As we had reached FSB1800 easily with the nForce 790i Ultra SLI, we decided to start at FSB1800. This worked properly and was absolutely stable.

FSB1900 speed could also be reached by slightly increasing the northbridge voltage.

There we go: FSB2000 is what we want to see for every enthusiast platform. Gigabyte’s X48T-DQ6 did well — but only at an increased voltage.

Once again we hit FSB2100 at 525 MHz base clock speed. Unlike the nForce 790i Ultra SLI, the X48 by Gigabyte was reliable at this speed. However, we could not get much further, as FSB2200 resulted in frequent crashes.