**Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 OC-Tips-Bios-Discussion Thread**

[luther138]

NP, Yeah, ~5'C cooler sounds cool, for now

The MB is very important component and I believe it will never be overkill. It is a good idea to invest on a good one, specially for you, it costs almost nothing compared to those "cheap" 975 you got.

Why didn't you get i7 920? or even better, wait for upcoming i7 930 which is right around the corner and 4 of them would cost almost as much as one 975, and would OC as good (for 24/7 use on air).
Those "cheap" 975 shows their strength on subzero cooling, but they OC almost the same as i7 920 for 24/7 use on air. The OC headroom of i7 depends on batch#, not the the model#.

Probably you can get a better 24/7 OC on air with a good batch# of i7 930 (you have a better chance to get a good batch# at the first days of release). I don't remember the exact resale date for 930, but should be here soon.

4 systems exactly the same OC? What are you up to, and what are you going to use them for?.

How would one even go about finding a vendor that gives a you a specific batch number let alone a good one?

I was forced to pull the trigger on a order before I had done enough research that's why I have 4, 975's. Also I was worried that it was possible I would get a bad batch# on a 920 and it wouldn't be able to hit even 4.2, and I am in a situation where whatever I can get in speed that only requires throwing money at is worth it (within reason). Water cooling would increase complexity, increase failure probability, and increase the amount of work to do before a deadline, not to mention I have to have 4 SOLID systems. Can't have one of four machines bust a hose in 2 months.

The application is a image processing application written in C(ish) for Linux utilizing the BLAS libraries. And will be used in medical research settings. The more images I can process the faster the better. Possibly this will gain doctors the ability to save more lives. (That could be a bumper sticker "Overclock your computer: It saves lives.")

You're right about this motherboard, hopefully the Gulftown will drop right in when it comes out (assuming BLAS takes advantage of all six cores).

I was hoping I would get lower temps then I have but I suppose I will have to be happy with the 1.8x speed increase I got over the stock 920 in our server (can't turn off the server to overclock).

This weekend I may have a look back at all the voltages from different people posted so far and see if there are any other tweaks I can get out of this. So far I have only been messing with QPI, DRAM and CPU Voltages, I'll see if I can pull any more performance out of this thing.

-Luther