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Overclocking

Overclocking the Gigabyte EP45-T Extreme was a mixed experience.

On one hand, it ran fine with up to 500MHz (2000MHz) FSB with few changes other than Vcore and Vfsb being bumped to 1.45V and 1.4V respectively, as long as the DDR3 timings were left at "Auto" and no attempt was made to exceed about 1600MHz memory speed with pretty sad auto timings.

On the other hand, the memory performance of the P45 chipset - as my other P45 reviews showed - is sub-standard compared to the X38 and even P35 chipsets.

On the third hand, overall performance was pretty damned good - excellent for business use, and average or better for gaming.

Best overall CPU performance on the board:

• 9.5x450 for 4.275GHz
• 1500-10-10-10-28 DDR3 timing forced by BIOS

The CPU speed is great, the DDR3 speed is less than inspiring.

Best FSB overclock:

• 8.5x500 for 4.25GHz
• 1567-10-10-10-29 DDR3 timing forced by BIOS

Power Consumption

As you can see, the power consumption is fairly decent, and does not get out of hand when overclocking.

At idle, there is about a 15W difference between idling and loading the CPU, the spread doubles to 30W at the maximum overclock.

Conclusion

The Gigabyte EP45-T Extreme is an excellent board, even with its DDR3 timing shortcomings.

It has great I/O expandability, and an excellent feature set; it was quite stable during testing - and I never had to remove the CMOS battery no matter how I tried to overclock it! I liked all the copper heatsinks and heatpipes too, and the debug LED and on-board switches are great when tweaking.

Don't put too much weight on the good, but less than stellar DDR3 performance - the performance is "good enough" that you can only tell the shortcomings of the P45 on some benchmarks, and it does not greatly affect benchmarks; frankly the easy overclockability and feature set outweigh the slight performance loss on the memory side of things.