Gigabyte Z87X-UD5 TH Thunderbolt 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 4.6GHz @ 46x multiplier and 100 BLCK.  The results are show below.

Overclocking the GA- Z87X-UD5 TH was pretty straight forward and can be done in a variety of ways.  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 Haswell based overclocking is based on "Knowing your processor".  Turns out that if you know what it takes to run a processor at a certain speed you can use those settings on just about any motherboard and get the desired result.  Knowing this is also what separates many motherboards from the competition and also why some settings on board (A) may not work on board (B).  

In our Synthetic and Real-World benchmarks we noticed a slight performance drop due to switching memory modules.  Normally we try to make sure our reference systems match but, we wanted to try something new and were actually hoping for better performance.  The end result was that using the default BIOS memory tuning the performance was lower than expected.  However, in our overclocking tests we configured the XMP Profile and actually got better results than many of our reference systems using the GSKill sticks,

The moral of the story here is, "Set XMP when you can"