Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6

I have never been a real fan of Gigabyte’s BIOS’, as I’ve found the versions ASUS builds to be far more user-friendly and easier to understand. There are a few reasons for this. The first is the fact that it’s clunky. In the overclocking section, there are so many sub-menus and options you need to set first in order to do certain things… it’s just not fun.

Another reason is that their voltages are not real values, but rather are + figures. To overclock memory, for example, you could set +0.3v, which increases the stock voltage by 0.3v. The reason this is a little confusing is because it doesn’t help when overclocking between different boards. While most others declare the real voltage value, Gigabyte doesn’t. The importance of this is minimal, but I’d much rather see real values.

In order to understand how it compares to other BIOS’, voltage-wise, you’ll need to know the stock voltages for components under a certain chipset. The northbridge, for example, is 1.20v by default, so +0.30v would bring it to 1.50v. It’s a little confusing at first, but once you spend a little time inside, you can get used to it fast.

The CPU voltage is the lone raw value here, which goes up to a staggering 2.35V. That is beyond needless, and it’s important to make sure you don’t accidentally set it. Chances are good that the system will just not boot, but that is way too much voltage to take a risk with.

Though it can’t be seen in the picture (due to it flashing), the DDR3 can be overclocked to 3.05V… also asinine. I’m unsure of the stock values for the PCI-E, FSB and MCH, but their values are equally open. Nothing is held back, that’s for sure.

There is not much more else in the BIOS that is unique or that interesting, so I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

With all that blue out of the way, it’s time to move right on into our testing methodology, followed by our results.