Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35T-DQ6 - PAGE 5J. Micah Grunert - Thursday, July 26th, 2007
The Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard has a very extensive set of BIOS features. But, there are a couple of little oddities that I had found to be a tad odd for my liking. We'll start with the graphical boot screen, which also offers a number of extra features.
As you can see, there are a few extras offered during boot. The nicest of which the QFlash option for flashing this motherboard to the latest BIOS. It presents the user with a simple shell environment to select and perform different low level activities. I'll profile some of these later, the rest of the BIOS awaits.
We can see that Gigabyte used the Phoenix Award system, as usual.
The Advanced BIOS Features are standard, but there was one option that brought a smile to my face.
This is an option to disable (or perhaps ignore) the temperature probe built into the processor. Case in point; Intel Core 2 Duo processors have a temp probe that will shut the system down when it hits 62 Degrees Celsius. Though I wouldn't recommend overclocking your processor to run hotter than 60 Degrees, being able to ignore this thermal trip is nice. Just make sure that you have some pretty hefty cooling to back it up.
Integrated Peripherals is a self explanatory standard.
Thought the SMART LAN cable length tester is neat, it locked up the test system for some odd reason.
And again, Power Management is another basic standard. Most of us elect to use the power button on the front of their case to turn things on.
The PnP/PCI Configuration is simply used for setting IRQs' (Interrupt Requests). Mostly useless to the average user.
But with the PC Health Status is, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Yes, the information is useful. Yes, setting temperature thresholds is good. But the information presented here falls short when it comes to voltages. Keep this in mind when we get to the Over Voltage Control section.
Here's the good stuff! The MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) is our overclocking headquarters for the Gigabyte 6-QUAD GA-P35DQ6 motherboard. There are tons of tweaks here, but a few seem to be missing.
There we go! That seems better. It's somewhat of an open secret, but by hitting Ctrl + F1 from the main BIOS screen in Gigabyte motherboards, it unlocks some advanced tweaking options. I'll take a minute to drift over them one by one, or at least the ones that really matter.
CPU Clock Ratio for CPU multipliers of 6, 7, and 8 with our E6400
CPU Host Frequency (MHz) to set the FSB from a range of 100 MHz to 700 MHz (times four to get the rated FSB frequency).
PCI Express Frequency (MHz) range of 90 MHz up to 150 MHz in 1 MHz steps, and Auto too.
C.I.A.2. (CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2) will automatically adjust the processor speed upward when more speed is needed. There are a number of selections for this (see image above). Interesting, though not true overclocking in any conceivable sense. Additionally, I've tried features like this on other motherboards and found the performance benefits to be either negligible of non-existent. We'll leave these alone.
Performance Enhance has three settings of Standard, Turbo, and Extreme; just a series of different speed presets.
Memory Frequency Multiplier (SPD) is a ratio method. It gives us four ratios to choose from, and the customary Auto setting. Here's how it works . . .
266 MHz FSB x 4 = 1066 MHz FSB
266 MHz FSB x 2 = Memory Speed of 532 MHz
266 MHz Memory Speed x Memory Multiplier Ratio of 2.4 = 638.4 MHz True Memory Speed
It's kinda weird, and does have us trying to recall those long and painful days spent in high school learning math, but this is how memory works.
High Speed DRAM DLL Settings are just two options for preset memory timings. Note; the DRAM Timing Selectable (SPD) must be set to Auto, rather than manual for this to work.
And now for the SPD Timings. I'm interested to see what kind of latencies we can set for our DDR3 memory. First we set the timing options to manual, then we tune or modules.
CAS Latency Time - 4 to 10 and Auto
DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay - 1 to 15 and Auto
DRAM RAS# Precharge - 1 to 15 and Auto
Precharge delay (tRAS) - 1 to 31 and Auto
ACT to ACT Delay (tRRD) - 1 to 15 and Auto
Rank Write To Read Delay - 1 to 31 and Auto
Write To Precharge Delay - 1 to 31 and Auto
Refresh to ACT Delay - Any whole number between 0 and 255
Read to Precharge Delay - 1 to 15 and Auto
TRD - 1 to 31 and Auto
tRD Phase Adjustment - 1 to 31 and Auto
A pretty decent serving of setting, though it's the first four that matter the most. Everything else can be left to Auto.
But now comes a very frustrating portion of this BIOS, the System Voltage Control. In terms of overclocking, pushing up the Vcore to the processor or voltage to the memory helps. But what helps even more is how Gigabyte chose to hide the running reference voltages. We're not told anywhere at what voltages the memory, PCI-e, FAB, and MCH are running at. We are simply given the option to increase the voltage to those system devices by preselected presets. The CPU Vcore is the only one that indicates what the current voltage reading is. Here's what presets we can select from.
DDR3 OverVoltage Control - +0.05V to +1.55V in 0.05V steps, and Normal
PCI-E OverVoltage Control - +0.05V to +0.35V in 0.05V steps, and Normal
FSB OverVoltage Control - +0.05V to +0.35V in 0.05V steps, and Normal
(G)MCH OverVoltage Control - +0.025V to +0.375V steps, and Normal
CPU Voltage Control - 2.35000V down to 0.050000V in 200 different steppings, and Normal
Okay, the Vcore adjustments are beyond great (though some higher settings would have been nice), but all of the other voltage tweaks are far too vague to use properly. They don't tell us the stock referance voltage anywhere! We'll do our best though.
And finally (but there's still a little more), hitting F9 will pop up with this window full of System Information. Very handy.
There a couple other notables, both of which are pretty unique.
Being able to save different BIOS profiles to the CMOS is a blessing. Hit F11 and you can save up to 8 different profiles with names up to 15 characters long.
Hitting F12 allows us to load one of our saved profiles, and the 'Last Known Good' configuration is especially handy for a botched overclocking attempt.
First, there's the Q Flash Utility. By hitting the 'End' key during the P.O.S.T. sequence, you will be redirected to a simple shell environment to allow for safe BIOS flashing. It's here where we can save our old BIOS (just in case something goes awry with our CMOS), or use a IDE hard drive, floppy drive, or USB thumb drive to update the BIOS. I had infact used this little utility, and my trusty 1GB thumbdrive to upgrade from the F1 BIOS to the more recent F2 BIOS. Worked like a charm. Sorry, no optical drives and or SATA drives allowed.
Xpress Recovery 2 is a data recovery/back-up utility that allows the end user to make images of their system hard drive, and allows for the restoration of said image in case of disaster.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get it working properly, so we'll leave it be.
There's a simple Boot Loader too.
I think we're done here.
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