Gigabyte Z170X UD5 Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 4.7Ghz @ 47x multiplier and 100 BLCK.  This is a very easy overclock to attain with the Core i5 6600K and slightly above the average.

I did mess with the BCLK overclocking to try out the enhanced BCLK chip that Gigabyte is using.  The controller does allow 1Mhz increments however my processor didn’t respond well to BLCK adjustments and would fail POST at anything over 3Mhz.  This is likely something they can fix with a BIOS update or could be related to memory compatibility.

When overclocking it is important to find a "sweet spot" where the performance curve tops out and still remains stable with a reasonable amount of heat production.  For this test I didn’t pay much attention to heat output but rather stability with the least amount of CPU voltage.  The for this is related to issues with the latest Ivy Bridge and Haswell chips using TIM under the heatspreader that doesn’t always transfer the same amount of heat.  As a result the CPU die always reads hotter than it should given the AIO cooler I’m using. 

Overclocking the Gigabyte Z170X UD5 was pretty straight forward and not much different from a LGA1150 Haswell.  For those familiar with the Gigabyte UEFI you can manually set frequencies and voltage or you can select any number of "auto up" options that will automagically overclock your system. 

The important thing to note with any overclocking adventure is to "know your processor" and take baby steps with frequency and voltage until you find a stable overclock that matches your cooling method.  In the case of this review I was able to push the processor up to 4.7Ghz with 2800Mhz memory and got a fairly good performance boost.