BIOS and Overclocking Expectations

Although Gigabyte was slow to adapt to the UEFI BIOS their implementation is quite good. A 3D BIOS eliminates the old style blue/black screen and is a graphical representation of the BIOS settings. The 3D BIOS features all the same overclocking and tweaking options of the BIOS of yesteryear. The changes made sync up between the 3D BIOS and the UEFI and are applied once the changes have been saved.

3D BIOS		Easy Tweaking

The information provided in the 3D BIOS could cover an entire review alone, so I've decided to give a high level over view of each of the screens. There are two ways to do most things in the BIOS. The first is to click the graphical representation of the item that you want to work with, for example, if you want to tweak the processor, you would click on the CPU socket and the options for that item would pop up in a separate overlaid window. The same is said for memory, hard drives, I/O panel, etc.

MIT		System

The second way is to click on the advanced icon at the bottom. This takes you to a little more traditional looking BIOS. The first screen that you are presented with is M.I.T. or motherboard intelligent tweaker. Here's where a lot of adjustments can be made to the CPU, memory, voltage as well as the temperature and fan controls. The second tab is the system tab. This is basically an information tab. You can set the system language as well as the date and time. The information you can gather is the model of the motherboard and the BIOS information.

BIOS Features		Peripherals

The next tab sets the BIOS Features, such as boot order, Bootup NumLock state, full screen logo, etc. You can also set the administrator and user password if you so desire. The peripherals tab contains the optional onboard features, such as RAID, USB 2.0 and Audio controllers. The final tab that we will be discussing is power management, there isn't a whole lot to explain here as it is exactly that, power management for the motherboard and processor, if you'd like to wake your computer up by a key press, you would set it here.

Overclocking / Expectations

Overclocking the Z77X-UD3H was extremely easy. To test out how easy it was on the first BIOS screen I clicked ont he CPU and bumped the CPU up to 4.5GHz and gave the core a little bump to 2.48v. The board booted into Windows without issue and I started throwing heat at it. I did not use Gigabyte's Easy Tune 6 to overclock the processor. I'm still of the old(er) school of thinking where you use the BIOS to overclock and not an application that runs within the system. Both options are fine, however I chose to use the BIOS.

I booted into Windows and start to do a burn in with OCCT. Initially I set up a 1 hour test and once the CPU and motherboard passed the test I set it for a 24 hour run. During the 24 hour test the processor temperature never exceeded 62°C.