one would be out of line as to not discuss this part of the motherboard . With only air cooling tested , what one did notice is that the CPU temperatures were slightly higher than with another competing motherboards . This could be inaccuracy of the probe placement but regardless , there were some discrepancies . Maximum frequency though was not affected , the test 7700K was capable of 5.2GHz at most even on the GAMING 7 . What is interesting is how GIGABYTE is dealing with memory overclocking . The board is listed as supporting memory configurations of up to 4133MHz . Since we did not have a set of such highspeed memory on hand , we had to settle with some RAM that has previously
reached the 4200MHz mark . Unfortunately , even 4GHz was not possible . Keep in mind however that reaching 4GHZ on a four-DIMM motherboard is rather difficult . In fact , the inability to reach this frequency has nothing to do with GIGABYTE per se as the memory is not rated at the frequency and of course it isn ’ t on the QVL either . Despite that , when it came to four-DIMM operation the motherboard managed 3,600MHZ at fairly tight timings . Respectable for sure . Using only two DIMMs didn ’ t ’ fare much better with the maximum frequency ( using the multiplier only ) at 3733MHz . The long and the short of it is that you ’ re better off at the lower frequency with four DIMMs as the performance is a little better and there ’ s not much OC headroom above that anyway . The board allows you to set much higher frequencies of course , but it has this ability ( or bug ) where if it isn ’ t able to POST at whatever settings . It simply lowers the multiplier . That is , if you set 3866 , which then fails , the board will try 3733 , then 3600 , followed by 3466 and so on until it is posting . It can lure you into a false sense of success when you believe you ’ ve actually managed to POST at those frequencies only to go back into the UEFI and see a much lower frequency than you ’ ve set .
Useful for when you ’ re still testing your system before building it into the case , but certainly frustrating for those who were looking to do some extreme overclocking on the motherboard .
Fortunately , the GAMING
24 The OverClocker Issue 40 | 2017