Gigabyte 6Quad GA-P35-DQ6 Review :: BIOS And Overclocking

There are two BIOS companies that are in general use on motherboards today, the Phoenix Award BIOS and one from American Megatrends. The 6Quad uses the Award Software BIOS with a few unique variations for Gigabyte. The overclocking features are placed in a submenu called M.I.T. (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker). The other menus on the main page are: Standard CMOS, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, PnP/PCI Configurations, and PC Health Status which are common to all Award BIOSs.

One concern with motherboards is a bad BIOS Flash, which can occur when power is turned off in the middle of a BIOS Flash or when the BIOS is a corrupt file. Gigabyte includes their Dual BIOS, which means that you can update your motherboard’s BIOS with ease and the security of knowing that you don’t have to worry about a bad flash. The dual BIOS also meant that we didn’t have to use the Clear CMOS jumper at any time during testing or working with the board.

The M.I.T. is where the meat of the motherboard tweaking comes into play. If you want the BIOS to automatically overclock, simply enable C.I.A 2 but the tweaker in me just doesn’t play that way. The Robust Graphics Booster overclocks the video card by up to 10% in Turbo mode automatically. CPU Clock Ratio on the E6850 we use for testing is from 8x-10x. The maximum CPU Host Frequency can be set from 100MHZ-700MHz in MHz increments.

Voltage options are varied. You can set DDR2 Overvoltage from +0.05v-1.55v in 0.05v increments. PCExpress overvoltage control can be set from +0.05 to +0.35v in 0.05v increments. FSB Overvoltage can be set from +0.05v to +0.35v in 0.05v increments. MCH Overvoltage can be set from +0.025v to +0.375v in 0.025v increments. Finally, CPU Overvoltage can be set from 0.83125v to 2.350000v in 0.00125v increments.

One issue that bothered me a little was the fact that the board shows overvoltage settings as +.xx volts above the default setting instead of the normal setting and +.xx volts. This results in the user being unaware at what the setting they set is, meaning you would not be aware of how overclocked the voltage percentage-wise would be on a new setting. Overclocking of the system with the 6850 we use for the new motherboard platform was painless with a 15% overclock. The board was totally stable throughout testing, which is always important. I really enjoyed taking the 6Quad GA-P35-DQ6 through its paces. Memory overclocking on the GA-P35-DQ6 is easy with the numerous dividers and loose memory voltages.

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