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The BIOS

The splash screen of the BIOS features a big "Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced" logo, among with other marketing speak - and given what I saw of the VRM's I have no doubt careful attention was spent on energy management.

Gigabyte used an Award BIOS, and our testing was done with the F10a BIOS sent to us by Gigabyte. At the end of the testing we received a newer F10d BIOS and re-ran some tests, however as we did not notice any change in performance, we are publishing the review with the F10a results.

The PCI device listing is not very exciting, but it does show you how the interrupts are assigned.

As usual for Gigabyte boards, all the fun stuff is under the "MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)" menu.

It took three screen captures to capture all of the options available on this screen - you will not be dissapointed at the ammount of control provided.

A note of caution... there seemed to be a 0.2V discrepancy between the DRAM voltage setting and what the hardware monitor showed as the DRAM voltage so the 2.2V shown here actually sent 2.4V to the Corsair PC2-8888's I was using at the time.

There is also a +0.1V offset on the processor voltage, so be careful out there!

The standard BIOS screens were exactly that - standard; however it was nice to see all those SATA channels :)