BIOS Walkthrough

Well, here's the BIOS. It's blue, and has settings you can change. It has all these neat little sections, and does many things. And this time it does them faster - much faster.

Honestly, there's not much different here than other current Gigabyte products - it is all the same basic stuff, but better.


I clicked my way through the first few subheadings, very much bored with what I was seeing - a near exact copy of the BIOS on the UD5H.


Except for one thing: every page popped up in an instant with no delay at all. I'm used to a slight delay when just moving the cursor around in BIOS, but even the mouse response was quick and snappy.


I had not considered that this was possible, as nearly every boardmaker is now using UEFI, and they are all prone to the same issues. That is, until I received the Z77X-UP5 TH.


I was just considering that, going through the provided fan controls, and noticing that the four system fan headers are linked, the CPU_FAN header was separate. The Noctua NH-C14 I use to test with uses two low-airflow fans that I like running at their default speed when testing. Due to the cooler design, checking fan options and such is par for the course, and that is when it sunk in how fast this BIOS really is. Pondering this, I continued through the listings and found a new setting under the MISCELLANEOUS heading named “Legacy Benchmark Enhancement”. Whatever could that be? I quickly turned it on, and booted the board. MOAR POINTS!!!


Oh, right, the BIOS. Yeah, it's big, blue, and fast. Kind of like a certain superhero.


I'm not really sure what else I can say about the BIOS, other than go on and on about how it's very clear this board is meant for overclocking in each and every layer of the PCB and BIOS code.


If you don't need it, it's not here as an option. Those "AUTO" settings, the ones I normally tell people to set manually? Yeah, forget what happened in the past and look at what's right here. This really is an evolution and it really does make me smile.


The best part of it all is that the very basic, very "old-school" version of the BIOS had me feel this way - Gigabyte has done more than just make that great. For those that prefer a more "visual" approach, there's a nice 3D-style BIOS mode that helps navigate through the mess of labels which change from brand to brand. Also, if you exit out of the BIOS in 3D mode, you come back to 3D mode, and if, like me, you prefer a more traditional layout, that's what pops back up the next time as well.

I think I've done enough drooling here.;)