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The BIOS

The GA-965P-DS3 uses a pretty vanilla Award BIOS.

As you can see, all the usual suspects are there, with the left hand side showing the seven available sub menu's.

• Standard CMOS Features
• Advanced BIOS Features
• Integrated Peripherals
• Power Management Setup
• PnP/PCI Configuration
• PC Health Status
• MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T)

The last one is the interesting one...

The Stantard CMOS page lets you configure the IDE/SATA devices, date, time, floppy etc.

You can obviously drill down to control the access mode of each SATA/IDE device, as well as check out its geometry.

The Avanced BIOS Features page lets you configure the boot order, CMOS password and some processor features such as SpeedStep and VT.

The Integrated Peripherals screen lets you control the on-board peripherals - SATA, USB, LAN etc.

The power management screen configures hibrenation, wakeup events, and what happens on power loss.

The PnP/PCI screen allows some control over interrputs; perhaps it should have been merged with the integrated peripherals screen?

As some of you are aware, there was a rash of problems with 965 (and some other) chipset based motherboards not booting with some high performance memory modules.

This problem was caused by the BIOS defaulting to 1.8V or 1.9V for the DDR2 voltage supply - which is woefully inadequate for high performance memory modules - for example our excellent Corsair TwinX PC8500 modules require 2.3V!

In the past, it used to be common for BIOSes to just say OK/Fail for voltages, and I'm afraid that Gigabyte still does this for memory voltages. Even worse, they do not explicitly state on the M.I.T. page that the base memory voltage is 1.8V - so unless you look at the PC Health screen (shown below) and notice that it says "DDR18V      FAIL" you won't know exactly how to set the precise voltage your modules may need. I WANT TO SEE ACTUAL VOLTAGES! Show me "1.8V" or "2.3" or whatever the voltage is at; Pass/Fail does not cut it for enthusiasts, especially since different DIMM modules have different requirements and tolerances for what voltages they will run at.

The "Fail" reading on DDR18V is a good example why this is a bad way to display memory voltage. Presumably it failed because I am driving the DDR2 memory with a +0.5 "overdrive" (when I should be able to pick "2.3V" for DDR2 voltage) - that is needed by these 2.3V DIMM's.

Now we get to the interesting part!

If after entering the BIOS you go straight to the MB Intelligent Tweaker, you might be disappointed.

Sure, it lets you control the FSB frequency, PCIe frequency, and memory multiplier (I LOVE simply setting a memory speed multiplier relative to FSB instead of meaningless 533/667/800/Auto that changes at the BIOS's whim!)

Gigabyte should give us a simple way to pick the DDR2 voltage from 1.8V...2.5V in 0.05V steps, similar to the way it lets you overvolt the processor.  The methodology of overvolting by percentage or a voltage offset that that they use is very reminiscent of the old school Gigabyte mentality that is slowly giving way in the past year or more, but unfortunately this current BIOS still has this type of design.

The FSB, MCH and CPU voltage control are well done. If this was all there was to it, it would still be a decent overclocking BIOS.

BUT THAT IS NOT ALL!

Some of you may not be aware that Gigabyte has a hidden "expert" mode for their tweaking functionality!

If you press "CTRL-F1" before entering the tweaking menu, you will get a LOT more choices!

You can set the main memory timing parameters
You can set the processor multiplier - it unlocks downwards!
You can enable the "Robust Graphics Booster"

Now that's better!