Gigabyte EX58-Extreme Motherboard Review :: Gigabyte EX58-Extreme BIOS and Overclocking

GIGABYTE uses a modified version of the Phoenix AwardBIOS that is used in the majority of the motherboards on the market today. The BIOS is split into MB Intelligent Tweaker, Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, PC Health Status, and the default settings.

The Standard CMOS Features are where the Date and Time are set, HDDs are detected, Drive A is set, Floppy 3 Mode is set and Halt on errors are set. If you have your HDDs set to RAID 0 mode, the drives won't be detected. In AHCI or Legacy IDE mode the drives are listed by type and name. One thing I wish motherboard manufacturers would get rid of is the FDD support as that is a bit long in the tooth.

Advanced BIOS Features is split into Hard Disk Boot Priority, First, Second, Third Boot devices, Password check, HDD SMART Capability, Limit CPUID Max, and No-Execute Memory settings. Here you also set the Init Display First, Full Screen Logo and Delay for HDD. Integrated Peripherals is where the RAID Mode and the USB, Firewire, Azalia and LAN are set. The onboard SATA and Smart Backup modes are also set here.

Gigabyte's X58 board was able to overclock to 3.84GHz from the 2.66GHz default clock using manual overclocking methods. Using Gigabyte's built in overclocking utility; I was able to use QuickBoost to run the system stably at 3.2GHz, the maximum that the utility supports. Full Thrust with 3.2GHz QB caused the system to be unstable as that overclocks the system by an additional percentage above the 3.2GHz setting.

The Motherboard Intelligent BIOS is where all the tweaking and overclocking on the board is done. The MB is done. The CPU Clock Ratio is fixed on the Core i7 920 and 940 CPUs but the base clock can be set from 100-1200MHz with 133MHz being the default base clock. Voltage of the QPI can be set up to 1.35V which is higher than the 1.2V default. System memory multipliers can be set to 6.0, or 8.0. The number of options on the BIOS is so extensive that you can't cover them in a review.

Bios screenshots