GIGABYTE 880GMA-UD2H Review

GIGABYTE uses a modified version of the Phoenix Award BIOS on their 880GMA-UD2H board. The main screen is split into the MB Intelligent Tweaker where the overclocking on the board is done, Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, PnP/PCI Configuration and PC Health Status. Standard CMOS Features is where the Date, Time, hard drives and total system memory detected are displayed. 

Advanced BIOS Features is where the CPU Features are enabled or disabled including AMD C1E Support, Virtualization, K8 Cool & Quiet, CPU Unlock, CPU Core control. Here is also where you set the boot device priority, the password check, the HDD SMART Capability, and the Init Display First. CPU Unlock works with CPUs that have disabled cores (2, 3, or 4 core CPUs that have 4 or 6 cores inside).

The Integrated Peripherals menu is where you set the SATA Controller Type and SATA Type. Here is also where you enable SATA 3.0 Support, the GSATA and ESATA controllers. The LAN, Audio, Firewire, USB 3.0, USB Legacy and USB Storage functions are all set here. Note that since I could not get RAID 0 to work on this board after a few different attempts, all tests were run in AHCI mode set in this menu.

The MIT or Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker is where the tweaking is done in the BIOS. Here you can set the internal Graphics Configuration, the CPU Clock Ratio, the NB Frequency, the CPU Host Clock Control, the PCIE Clock, PCIe Spread Spectrum, the HT Link Frequency, HT Link Width, the Memory Clock, the DRAM Configuration, and the System Voltages. The internal graphics configuration allows you to set the UMA, the Surround View, which video connection to use first the internal graphics clock speed, and more.  I was able to overclock the 1090T CPU we use to 4GHz on this board without problems. I have compiled a chart outlining the various settings in the BIOS below: