Eldonko
Well-known member
Overclocking Results
Overclocking Results
As we typically do for reviews, we put the G1.Sniper 2 through countless hours of overclocking and testing; from auto overclocking with the click of a button to manual overclocking where tweaking is king. We omitted sub-zero testing in this case since this board is really targeted towards gamers rather than benchers.
The OC button on the Sniper 2’s rear panel was a pleasure to work with. There was no rebooting and no BIOS changes needed to achieve a reasonable overclock. This button works on the fly, which means you press it and instantly enjoy a 700Mhz overclock on some processor. Gamers will like this because they can keep their system at stock for web browsing and non-intensive tasks and boost to 4200Mhz (on a 2600K) instantly while gaming.
The system was rock stable while using the OC button and we were able to run stress tests without any issue. It would have been nice to see a modest memory overclock like we have seen with ASUS boards but Gigabyte likely did not include this for simplicity’s sake.
For manual overclocking we know our chip is capable of 5Ghz since we have achieved this milestone on a number of boards so we went right for that speed. We started with a CPU overclock without touching the memory and went right for 50x multi and 100.0 BCLK. From experience, we knew that this 2600k needs 1.42-1.45v (load) to maintain 5Ghz so we set LLC to level 7 and tried 1.42v. We know LLV level 7 is ideal from experience with other Gigabyte boards as more than that gives a fairly large overvolt. 1.42V was not quite enough for LinX so we gradually increased vCore to the point of stability which was 1.455v BIOS and 1.464v load. This was a little more voltage than we have seen with some other boards but not by much.
The next step was to maximize the memory overclock to go along with the 5Ghz on the CPU. Our G.Skill memory is rated for 1067 @ 9-9-9 so that was a natural first step. With 1:8 (21.33) mem frequency, we were unable to get our memory stable at the stock voltage of 1.65v. We tried different slots, more vDIMM, more VCCIO, looser timings, and a single stick but stability was not possible with a 1:8 divider. All other memory frequencies worked great and we settled on the 1:7 frequency and 936Mhz on the memory at 9-9-9.
We felt like we were left unsatisfied with the results of the Trident so we got our hands on a kit of F3-17000CL9D-4GBXL Ripjaws and set the 21.33 mem freq. The Sniper 2 booted into Windows for the first time with 1:8 and voila, it was totally stable. That said we can chalk the issues with the Trident and 21.33 up to incompatibility. It is a few years old now and no longer available so it is not surprising but nonetheless concerning since it worked without an issue on every other board. Make sure to take note of this problem if you are planning on using older memory modules with the Sniper 2.
Overclocking Results
As we typically do for reviews, we put the G1.Sniper 2 through countless hours of overclocking and testing; from auto overclocking with the click of a button to manual overclocking where tweaking is king. We omitted sub-zero testing in this case since this board is really targeted towards gamers rather than benchers.
The OC button on the Sniper 2’s rear panel was a pleasure to work with. There was no rebooting and no BIOS changes needed to achieve a reasonable overclock. This button works on the fly, which means you press it and instantly enjoy a 700Mhz overclock on some processor. Gamers will like this because they can keep their system at stock for web browsing and non-intensive tasks and boost to 4200Mhz (on a 2600K) instantly while gaming.
The system was rock stable while using the OC button and we were able to run stress tests without any issue. It would have been nice to see a modest memory overclock like we have seen with ASUS boards but Gigabyte likely did not include this for simplicity’s sake.
For manual overclocking we know our chip is capable of 5Ghz since we have achieved this milestone on a number of boards so we went right for that speed. We started with a CPU overclock without touching the memory and went right for 50x multi and 100.0 BCLK. From experience, we knew that this 2600k needs 1.42-1.45v (load) to maintain 5Ghz so we set LLC to level 7 and tried 1.42v. We know LLV level 7 is ideal from experience with other Gigabyte boards as more than that gives a fairly large overvolt. 1.42V was not quite enough for LinX so we gradually increased vCore to the point of stability which was 1.455v BIOS and 1.464v load. This was a little more voltage than we have seen with some other boards but not by much.
The next step was to maximize the memory overclock to go along with the 5Ghz on the CPU. Our G.Skill memory is rated for 1067 @ 9-9-9 so that was a natural first step. With 1:8 (21.33) mem frequency, we were unable to get our memory stable at the stock voltage of 1.65v. We tried different slots, more vDIMM, more VCCIO, looser timings, and a single stick but stability was not possible with a 1:8 divider. All other memory frequencies worked great and we settled on the 1:7 frequency and 936Mhz on the memory at 9-9-9.
We felt like we were left unsatisfied with the results of the Trident so we got our hands on a kit of F3-17000CL9D-4GBXL Ripjaws and set the 21.33 mem freq. The Sniper 2 booted into Windows for the first time with 1:8 and voila, it was totally stable. That said we can chalk the issues with the Trident and 21.33 up to incompatibility. It is a few years old now and no longer available so it is not surprising but nonetheless concerning since it worked without an issue on every other board. Make sure to take note of this problem if you are planning on using older memory modules with the Sniper 2.
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