Gigabyte P55-UD5 Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

GIGABYTE uses a modified version of Phoenix’s AwardBIOS. The main menu is split into MB Intelligent Tweaker (MIB), Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, and PC Health Status. The Standard CMOS features are where the Date, Time, IDE drive and Drive A are detected.

Advanced BIOS Features is where you set your HDD boot Priority, the Boot Device Order, and Init Display First. Integrated Peripherals is where you set your SATA RAID controller mode to enabled, control the USB ports, the HD Audio, the LAN jacks, the external SATA controller and the GSATA controller. Power Management is where you set the Suspend modes and the Soft On by PWR button.

GIGABYTE has done a great job with the overclocking aspect of the board. Their Smart QuickBoost allowed the Intel Core i5 750 to overclock 100% stably to 3.2GHz, the maximum TurboBoost clock that the CPU is qualified to run at. Using their Advanced Options I was able to run the Core i5 750 at 3.5GHz, a very nice overclock indeed.

The MB Intelligent Tweaker is where all of the tweaking of the motherboard is done. Here you can adjust the BCLK Frequency, enable the Extreme Memory Profile, change the System Memory Multiplier, the memory frequency, the PCI Express frequency and more. Here is a chart representing the settings in the BIOS and the range of possibilities:

Setting	Range
QPI Clock ratio	Auto, x32, x36
BCLK Frequency	100-1200
XMP	Disabled, Profile 1, Profile 2
PCI Express Frequency	90-150MHz
CIA 2	Disabled, Cruise, Sports, Racing Turbo, Full Thrust
CPU Clock Drive	700mV, 800mV, 900mV, 1000mV
PCI Express Clock Drive	700mV, 800mV, 900mV, 1000mV
CPU Clock Skew	0ps-750ps
Performance Enhance	Standard, Turbo, Extreme
Channel Interleaving	1-6
Rank Interleaving	1-4
CAS Latency Time	6-15
tRCD	1-15
tRP	1-15
tRAS	1-31
tRC	1-63
tRRD	1-7
tWTR	1-31
tWR	1-15
tWTP	1-31
tWL	1-10
tRFC	1-255
tRTP	1-15
tFAW	1-63
CMD	1-3
Round Trip Latency	1-255

Bios Screenshots