GIGABYTE decided to use their setup for the board. BIOS's can get corrupt; either when flashing or if a virus gets on the computer. If the Award BIOS gets corrupt on the GA-8N Quad Royal SLI board, the secondary BIOS takes over, giving you added protection.
The BIOS provided by GIGABYTE is the standard Award BIOS many manufacturers use on their motherboards. One specialized function on the GIGABYTE board is the ability to set the PCI Express lanes to the needed settings. The available settings are shown in the table below. As you can see having 4x PCI Express x16 slots can complicate matters when installing a video card somewhat dramatically.
| PCI Express Slot #1 |
PCI Express Slot #2 |
PCI Express Slot #3 |
PCI Express Slot #4 |
| X1 |
X16 |
X16 |
X1 |
| Inactive |
X16 |
X8 |
X8 |
| X1 |
X16 |
3D1 card |
X1 |
| Inactive |
3D1 card |
3D1 card |
X1 |
| X8 |
X8 |
X8 |
X8 |
One thing GIGABYTE includes is a SLI "paddle". In most motherboards this paddle is used to enable SLI mode when two NVIDIA video cards are installed. On the GIGABYTE board, the SLI paddle is used solely to install a 3D1 card, which is two NVIDIA cards chipsets all on one PCB. Overclocking options on the GIGABYTE board are enabled through the Memory Intelligent Booster and CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2 in the BIOS. The Intel 3.8GHz CPU we use for testing in our test system is not very overclocker friendly. In this case, I was able to overclock the CPU to 4.18GHz, a 10% overclock.
BIOS Shots
