BIOS & Overclocking

Upon entering the Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 BIOS, it's safe to say everything looks the same as with any recent Gigabyte boards. The MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) is still the menu of choice for overclockers.

Once in the "Advanced Frequency Settings" submenu, which is found in the MB Intelligent Tweaker section, we were able to reach a 4.7GHz overclock using a Core i7-2600K processor (from the original 3.4GHz). We set the CPU Clock Ratio to 44x and left the BCLK Frequency at 100Mhz. The DRAM frequency was set to 1866MHz and CPU voltage was increased to 1.375v, which we considered to be safe enough.

Because we were running the memory above specification, the DRAM voltage was increased to 1.64v, which is the highest recommended setting – going higher could damage the processor, we've been told. All other BIOS settings were left alone, meaning we only touched three settings to achieve this impressive overclock.

Pushing the Core i7-2600K processor past 4.7GHz was difficult as things grew unstable. This seems to be the limit of our chip, at least when using an air cooler. Still, a 4.7GHz overclock on such a powerful processor is nothing to be ashamed about.

As a side note, Gigabyte has been dropping the ball lately by not including BIOS profiles/configurations, which can be handy when overclocking. These days, it's just assumed that any motherboard costing over $200, let alone $300, will provide you with that kind of functionality. We hope Gigabyte can correct this in a future update, but since it's been an issue with all of its recent boards, we're not hopeful.