Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 Motherboard Review :: Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 BIOS and overclocking

The LOGO screen on bootup shows the main features of the board including the 6-Quad features. Touching the TAB button allows the system to POST, the Delete button accesses the BIOS Setup. F9 accesses the XpressRecover2 utility. F12 sets the system to the Boot Menu and the End button sets up the QFlash menu. Very intuitive and useful with most functions a click away.

Gigabyte uses the standard Phoenix AwardBIOS with a few modifications for their specific configuration. The BIOS is split into Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, PnP/PCI Configuration, PC Health Status, and MB Intelligent Tweaker. The Standard CMOS Features has the Date, Time, IDE Configuration and Floppy mode support. Advanced BIOS features are where the Boot Priority, Password Check, HDD SMART and CPU Features are enabled or disabled. The Hard Disk Boot Priority Menu shows what Hard disks are on the system and what order you want to prioritize them. The Advanced BIOS menu is also where you set whether the Full Screen LOGO and Init Display First settings.

Integrated Peripherals is where the SATA/RAID/AHCI Mode is enabled or disabled. Here is also where the USB devices are enabled or disabled including 2.0 support, USB Keyboard, USB Mouse support is enabled. The other onboard devices including the onboard Audio, onboard Firewire and Onboard LAN devices are also controlled by this menu.

The other menus except for the MIT are fairly standard. The PC Health menu shows the temperatures, voltages and fan speeds of the fans, CPU and system fans. PnP/PCI sets the interrupt requests for the two PCI Slots on the motherboard. Power Management Setup sets up some of the energy saving features of the X48T-DQ6. Q-Flash allows you to flash the BIOS from a Flash drive or other non-Windows environment.

The Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker is the meaty part of the BIOS where all of the overclocking is accomplished. The Robust Graphics Booster increases the bandwidth to the graphics card to get higher performance but won’t work with every video card and is not guaranteed to work normally with this settings changed from Auto, Fast or Turbo.

CPU Clock Ratio on locked CPUs is set maxed to the ratio the CPU has available. Unlocked CPUs have the option to go up to 16 x ratios. There’s also a Fine CPU Clock Ratio that can add +0.5 to the ratio if it is supported. The CPU Host Frequency (FSB) can be set from 100-700MHz. Of course no Intel CPU can currently run at 700MHz FSB, but the option is there if you can find one that will. PCI Express Frequency can be set from 90MHz-150MHz.

CIA2 is the automated overclocking utility on the X48T-DQ6 motherboard. There are six settings: Disabled, Cruise, Sports, Racing, Turbo and Full Thrust. The Cruise setting set the CPU to a maximum 3.486GHz from the 3.2GHz default setting. The Sports setting set the CPU frequency too high to POST, so I didn’t try it beyond a couple of tries. The System Memory Multiplier sets the memory speed according to the SPD data.

DRAM Timings can be set from the Standard and Advanced Timing Control menus. CAS Latency can be set from 4-11. DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay can be set from 1-15. DRAM RAS# Pre-charge can be set from 1-15. Pre-charge delay can be set from 1 to 63. tRRD can be set from 1-15. Rank Write to READ Delay can be set from 1-31. Write to Pre-charge delay can be set from 1-31. Refresh to ACT Delay can be set from 0-255. Write to Pre-charge Delay can be set from 1-15. Static Tread value range is from 1-31. Static tRead Phase adjust value is from 0-31. CMD value is from 1T or 2T. Voltages can be set from a wide range for each setting. DDR3 Overvoltage can be set from 0.05v to +1.55V in 0.05V increments. PCI-E Overvoltage control can be set from +0.05V to +0.75V in 0.05v increments. FSB OV can be set from 0.05v-0.35v in 0.05v increments. (G) MCH OV Control can be set from 0.025v-0.775v in 0.025 increments. CPU Voltage can be set from 2.35000V-0.50000V in 0.00625v increments.

BIOS Shots