Going to the ATX Gigabyte EP45-UD3P

[Dadofamunky]

I'm planning on keeping everything else. I've just gotten tired of the microATX form factor. My system audio has been stuttering on all types of media - BluRay, YouTube, ITunes, you name it. So after a close look at NewEgg, it looks like I'm going with the EP45-UD3P. Should be a good fit for the E8600. What I want to know is: what quirks are there with the UD3P that aren't covered in Graysky's OCing guide? Keep in mind that I'm a fairly experienced overclocker and plan to do so this time, and hopefully squeeze a few more megacycles out of my CPU for awhile.

 

[EnzoLT]

its a pretty solid board and has a lot of settings that i didnt get a chance to mess with when i still had my build. if by quirks means errors/flaws, i didnt encounter any.

 

[TemjinGold]

Not sure if my input is worth anything as I'm a noob at OC but my former DS3L didn't like ANY OC and kept bluescreening every so often. Swapped it for this board and haven't had a bluescreen since (it's been a couple of months now.)

 

[Spike99]

FYI,

I just got this MOBO... Although I have a sound card and disabled MOBO audio... I'm very happy with this MOBO. With my old ASUS mobo, I had a couple of issues like taking along time to boot and it was powering off all the time after upgrading to new video card (ATI 5870). I don't have any of these issues now...

This mobo seems to be very popular and I can see why...

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

It's a great quad overclocker at an entry level price! Can't ask for much more.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Yeah, I'm definitely looking to pop in a Q9550 or such before too long, which is one reason I was eying this board. There's nothing I do at this point that requires an i7, much as that would be a very fun upgrade. It's simply a cost issue. It'd be nice to crank a quad up to 4 GHz.

Btry, how have you set up your Q9550 instance? Speedwise I mean? I note it has water.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Yeah, I'm definitely looking to pop in a Q9550 or such before too long, which is one reason I was eying this board. There's nothing I do at this point that requires an i7, much as that would be a very fun upgrade. It's simply a cost issue. It'd be nice to crank a quad up to 4 GHz.

Btry, how have you set up your Q9550 instance? Speedwise I mean? I note it has water.

I'm just going with a mild overclock of 3.4Ghz. It's real simple. I just set the fsb to 400 and the divider to 2.00B. I manually set the timings and voltage for the ram. The rest is on Auto. It sets the vcore to 1.28v but I'm thinking it can do lower than that I just don't want to put the time in to finding out. And to be honest, the best way to test the system for me is to run Unreal Tournament III. If it crashes, something aint getting enough voltage or the ram is unstable.

I think the board loves low voltage RAM. 2.1v and the board gets finiky. I found a really nice set of 800Mhz ram @ 4.4.4.12 - 1.9v Link . The 1000Mhz kit I have will do 1.8v 800Mhz @ 5.5.5.15 and since I'm gaming on XP Pro sp3, 2g is all I really need. I think I barely break 1g of ram usage judging by Task Manager.

 

[maluckey]

Dadofamunky,

You chose a solid DD2 board. The way I see it, the Gigabyte UD3 series is the most solid DDR2 performance-board for the dollar out there.

I'm as lazy as can be with overclocking, so I set the Ram to run at 1080 mhz, (turbo settings with 5-5-5-30 timing and 2.2 volts), set the FSB at 450 x 8 with 1.32 volts to the core (CPU=Q9400) and BAM! It booted and ran.

A bit of minor voltage tweaks for VTT and PLL after that, which took all of ten minutes, and I ran Intel Burn Test at maximum for 10 runs. Temperatures were good (56C), so it's the last that I did. That was over a year ago. Hasn't crashed ......ever.

Mobo: Gigabyte UD3R-ver 1.1
RAM: 2x 2 GB Kingston Hyper-X, rated for 1066 mhz 5-5-5-15, 2.3v
OS: XP 64 Bit (AKA Server 2003)
HDD= 2 x 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black.
Audio: Asus Xonar D2X
Graphics: BFG GTX 275 OC

Good luck with the board! You won't need it though.