BIOS:
Gigabyte is using a plain AWARD 1MB BIOS. Last time we wrote about it we said that hiding any setting was quite a silly decision, and in the meantime Gigabyte promised they would change it and they did. Of course, many vendors have a habit of enabling COM1 and LPT, which are not used any more. Also, they do not include a COM/LPT bracket in the package. Also, the "overvoltage" and "deovervoltage" settings have been removed. Just plain simple voltage settings, that's how we like it.


FSB-Overclocking:
The EP45-UD3P did very well. It reached 550MHz FSB, but it would not go any further, but in this price category it's still unmatched.




CPU-overclocking:
It was not difficult to reach 4.40GHz. We set the VCore to 1.6000V, enabled Loadline Calibration -  a feature we missed testing the EP35 series. The VCore dropped to 1.568V. We know the sensors are not very exact, but the VRM keeps inside Intel specifications.




Memory-overclocking:
Gigabyte hasn't got the best reputation when it comes to memory overclocking. While the EP35 series was marked with 1200MHz this board says it can do 1366+MHz. 1200MHz was not a problem.




Because we have no higher clocking DDR2 kit, we eased the memory latencies to 6-6-6-18 and set them to 1333MHz and it worked without trouble, so it seems more copper inside the PCB does benefit overclocking after all.




FSB BIOS clocking:
We have to state that we always recalculate the bench results to nominal frequencies. Most vendors do an overclock to their products, maybe to get more bench points, but we nullify such attempts. The Gigabyte is quite close to the nominal speeds: