BIOS Walkthrough

Gigabyte offers a new "3D BIOS" with its AMI UEFI boards, that allows easy navigation of settings, by clicking the board's image of where there parts are. It's a good tool for learning your way around the motherboard, and does offer a handy monitoring panel when in the menus, but I found the offered options a bit limited in some areas, where others were very nearly an exact copy of what's offered in the more traditional layout.


That traditional layout is what first appeared when I booted the board, and everything that followed was quite like what's offered on the Gigabyte X79-UD5 that I reviewed many many weeks ago. I had to hit "ESC" on my keyboard to get the 3D interface to pop up.


All of the options are found in now-familiar places, and organized in such a way that every option you need is easy to find, with the overclocking options first and foremost.


Power options are quite varied, with user-adjustable settings for most of the VRM's functions. I have yet to see another board that offers as many options; ASUS does come close, but they miss a few things that Gigabyte does not, although those options have to actually prove critical to 24/7 operation.


There's really not much that can be said that isn't explained by these screenshots, however it is worth noting is that the fan control is split into two sections; one for the CPU, and another for all other fans. Personally, I prefer the option of individual control for each fan by itself. You can set individual fan fail warnings, but "SmartFan" controls are not as diverse.


I really have to commend Gigabyte for tightening up the BIOS presentation here, with a layout that few others manage to replicate. There are hundreds of options, but you wouldn't realize it thanks to the fantastic design.


Across the top you find the main headings, and under each is all the options for each section; all overclocking stuff together, all component options together; I really couldn't find anything wrong here at all.


Well, perhaps there is one thing: the first image above shows the peripheral drive controller options. Very simple and easy to understand, except...which is which? The options to bypass the default boot device, and boot from other drives is here as well and there is also a tool provided to flash the BIOS with, so literally every angle is covered, including the ability to capture screenshots of the BIOS pages, which I used to capture these images.

I must admit, I really like Gigabyte's new BIOS design, which has barely been around for 6 months. When the Intel X79 Express boards launched, Gigabyte debuted their AMI UEFI implementations and with Z77 Express, they've really tighten things up to the point that there is very little that could be improved other than a few minor details. One of the most important parts of BIOS design is ensuring that a wide variety of memory modules work properly, and at the point when i did my testing, I didn't run into any issues at all with any of the kits I have on hand, which is really saying something considering the boards have been out for only a few weeks.