Overclocking Performance

The overclocking performance of the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P is almost laughable when you've used Gigabyte boards previously. It flat out won't do 2.6GHz northbridge core speed on our CPUs and without far more excessive voltage on the northbridge, even get 2.4GHz stable in some applications we tested here. 3.7GHz was also the firm cut off point, where anything over would simply not boot.

In addition to this, instead of detecting a failed boot and resetting itself to stock speeds, like most Gigabyte boards do, the UD5P just sits there and continually spins the fans up and down until it's turned off, had the CMOS cleared and then turn on again, having to reload our saved BIOS profile and continue overclocking. It's a hassle and a waste of time because your clear CMOS button must always be kept at arms length.

It's fussy and fidgety. We uninstalled the Nvidia drivers and changed graphics cards, while overclocked, and it refused to boot up again even after a Clear CMOS. It had to wait until the power drained, hit the Clear CMOS button again, then left for a few minutes before trying again. Too soon and it could cough into life and shut itself off - the power button doing nothing. When it does this three or four times because it's turned on too soon, we began to invent new swear words to vent our frustration.

We squeezed out a 3.7GHz CPU core clock and 2.4GHz northbridge clock, but it didn't like the CL7 rated 1,600MHz memory running at its SPD speed. Instead it would accept relaxed timings of CL8 and still 1T, but the other more advanced settings below were relaxed further.

At 1.5V vCore and 1.5V CPU-northbridge, the latter is certainly a heavy hitter compared to the MSI in particular. The CPU PLL voltage is very limited and we easily maxed it out by just pushing it to the top of its three settings, and even though the F5c BIOS does add more niche enthusiast memory options like drive strengths, this does little to alleviate a rotting core.

Overclocked Gaming Performance

The Gigabyte board clearly lags behind in all the tests, single and multi-GPU behind the MSI. While the MSI is only really faster in CPU-memory controller clock, the fact the Gigabyte lagged a bit in the normal game benchmarks doesn't help here and the MSI ekes a good few fps lead in all accounts.