Overclocking
A high reference clock is impressive, but CPU stability is more important. Gigabyte’s loss in base clock speed is thus far less significant than its CPU clock win.
The fastest CPU overclocking motherboards, the Gigabyte X58-Extreme and EVGA X58 3X SLI, were also the only ones to support Turbo mode with EIST disabled. The Rampage II Extreme wouldn’t support Turbo mode once the base clock was altered, even if EIST was left on, while others that required EIST to enable Turbo had higher-speed stability with EIST disabled.
Our DRAM overclocking charts are sorted by average of three-DIMM and six-DIMM test results. DFI takes the DRAM overclocking crown because of its high stability with six DIMMs installed, while MSI leads when only three are present. We must also note that the combination of the Eclipse SLI motherboard and our Core i7 920 processor was not able to function with the 8x base clock (16x data rate) DRAM multiplier, and we instead had to use a bus speed setting of 155 MHz with a 7x base clock to reach DDR3-2166.
