Ethermaster

I have been playing far to much Assetto Corsa it seems .... BMW M3 Ferrari LaFerrari Ferrari F14T

I think some of you are missing the point, how many of you were rocking p35 boards and CPU's then made the jump to either Z68 or Z77? Apart from the DDR2 to DDR3 upgrade all you had to do if buy the new CPU put your old board back in its box and just pay to ship to Gigabyte and get your hands on the latest chip-set and socket for free is all you had to do.. How many would have done it in a heartbeat instead of having to pay for a new board as well? That is what Gigabyte are offering so its a great deal in my eyes

As far as I'm aware the upgrade-warranty is standard on all Z97 black edition boards as long as you register the board with Gigabyte directly, the way it works is with when you upgrade you need to ship the black edition certificate with the board for validation.

Maybe with Linus (or other people in his position) making others aware in the USA that Gigabyte is doing this in Europe they maybe able to force Gigabyte's hand in extending the programme there as well.

If you live in Europe it looks like your in for a treat from the guys over at Gigabyte with their new upgrade programme of their 'Black Edition' motherboards on the Intel X97 chip-set. Basically if you buy a 'Black Edition' motherboard you will be able to upgrade to the next chip-set or socket motherboard for free within a 3 year period, which are covered by Gigabyte's 60 month warranty so its kinda a no brainier. For example if you go with one today of the LGA 1150 socket and the Z97 chip-set in a years time you will be able to upgrade to the Z100 chip-set for free if the board is up to the same price all you will have to do is cover the shipping costs or the difference if the new motherboard is of a higher value. The boards that are part of this offer are as follows: GA-Z97X-Gaming G1 WIFI-BK GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK Participating countries: Austria Belgium Denmark Germany Finland France Great Britain Ireland Iceland Italy The Netherlands Norway Portugal Sweden Switzerland Spain Lets not also forget if your British the RMA base is in the UK so you will not have to the ship the motherboard to the other side of the world so the upgrade service should be a fast process. Further information can be found here: http://bk.gigabyte.eu/EN_bk_UK_Ireland.html http://bk.gigabyte.eu/EN_notice_UK_Ireland.html

Leave the blk clock to 100MHz (set it manually), dial in your memory to match the cas timing and speed manually). I only needed 1.29v to get mine to 4.7GHz with the running 1 hour passes of OCCT AVX linpack, sometimes I needed to adjust the CPU ring voltage but only once. Don't touch your ring voltages unless you know what your doing.

what bios are you running, I know that on that very motherboard I have hit 4.8GHz on a number of different boards. With Gigabyte the Bios you need is F5 where as the board ships with F4 (don't know why).

As a rule, the A55 doesn't allow overclocking.

In your case then I would if you want to upgrade either buy just a another stick of some random brand (knowing that the RAM will run at the slowest speed and may effect your final overclock), or buy a matched pair and just stick your single stick into another slot as this will behave as single channel anyway (until you put a forth stick in) but you will benefit still from the increase capacity but will still take the performance hit with your final CPU overclock as the memory overclock with AMD is directly tied to the CPU blk clock unlike Intels main stream platform

If the new board costs more then your will just have to pay the difference between the two motherboards as well its kinda a no brainier atm...

if you live in the UK then a Gigabyte black edition is really the only way to go because if you buy a Gigabyte board when you want to upgrade will give you the newer board for free, yes you heard that right completely FREE !!! (as long as it costs the same or less).... Details of this deal can be found on the link below, Of note you do really need to buy the board from an Gigabyte partner like Overclockers UK, Scan Computers or Aria to name a few http://bk.gigabyte.eu/EN_bk_UK_Ireland.html

I own the Gigabyte Z87X-OC and think that the old / advanced bios is the best of the bunch but that maybe just showing my age and the ease that I find using them plus Gigabyte's full overclocking features an half the cost of the full blow ROG extreme motherboards is a positive plus

Its all to do with the way CPU's are manufactured and binned. When the manufacture produces a wafer of lots of CPU's dies not all are created equal, so the manufacture tests them and bins them according to performance targets. Now not all the chips will sit within these performance tasks so what do you think the manufacture will do... put them in the trash? hell no its time to create a new Sku and release it to market

Go with the Intel Pentium G3258 and a decent H81,B87, H97 or Z97 but note that you may need to flash the bios on the 'H' and 'B' series motherboards to get it supported with its overclocking options unlocked, with the G3258 you really do need to overclock it to get the most out of it. The G3258 does run duel channel or single channel its depends if you have correct dimm slots populated with matching pairs. Voltages have very little to almost nothing to do with how the memory controller choices to run single,dual or quad channel, the voltages are more to do with stability and timings and the memory controller on Haswell is flipping epic come paired to the AMD as the 2 7800K's that I have personally used will not post if I use memory over 2400MHz where as an G3258 I have used allowed me to dial in 2666MHz right of the bat without any problems.

Once Slick stops taking it home to have dirty Ruben (Overclocking) love with it