14 DAY TRIAL // Gigabyte's GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard is one of the best Sandy Bridge overclocking boards around and thanks to a recently released BIOS, the platform became a whole lot better, since it now allows enthusiasts to raise the CPU multiplier up to 59x.
The new beta BIOS is called the F8x versions and, although it isn't yet available officially, it has made its way to various Internet forums on websites like TweakTown or Hwbot.
After the download is complete, the BIOS can be flashed from Windows, using Gigabyte's @BIOS tool, or from the BIOS with the help of the Q-Flash tool.
A third option is to use the FLASHSPI application from a DOS environment.
Just as we have explained in our article describing the overclocking potential of Intel's latest architecture, a higher multiplier would allow for higher clock speeds as the processor's frequency is calculated as the product between the multiplier of the CPU and its BLCK.
As the BLCK in the Sandy Bridge architecture is fixed and can't be increased more than 8%, the only method left to achieve a high overclock is to buy a K-series CPU and raise the multiplier.
Unfortunately, although the K-series processors are specially designed with overclockers in mind, Intel has limited the chip's multiplier to 57x, so this BIOS would allow for higher than normal operating frequencies to be achieved.
The GA-P67A-UD7 is Gigabyte's top of the line LGA 1155 motherboard and carries an impressive amount of features such as a 24 phase power delivery system, 10 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, 6 SATA 6Gbps connectors as well as Gigabyte's patented DualBIOS technology.
In addition, the board is also CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI compatible and is compatible with 3-way multi-GPU configurations.
The BIOS can be downloaded from here and a detailed instruction guide regarding BIOS flashing with Q-Flash is available here.