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Gigabyte use their attractive 3D BIOS on this motherboard which is reasonably easy to navigate. We don't feel it's quite as logically laid out as the BIOS interfaces we've seen from Asus and ASRock though.
We have separate pages for the frequency, memory, and voltage settings as well as PC Health Status, miscellaneous settings and BIOS status. These contain all the settings we need to overclock with the motherboard.
Under the second tab we're able to see some basic information about the BIOS.
The third tab contains all the boot configuration options.
On the peripherals page we find some more configuration options for the SATA controller and other onboard devices.
We find the power management settings under the fifth tab.
The final tab of the software contains options for boot overide and lets us load optimised defaults.
Pressing F1 in the BIOS brings up the 3D mode brings up a large image of the motherboard which lets us analyse areas of the motherboard we are configuring with different settings. This will be quite educational (and useful) for novice users.
Overclocking
We were able to achieve an impressive overclock of 4.8 GHz with our i7-3770K using a baseclock of 100 MHz, a multiplier of 48x and a core voltage of 1.36V. This are the settings we used for our overclocked testing. We managed to boot the system at 4.9 GHz but this required over 1.4V which wouldn't really be safe 24/7.
See validation here.
great motherboard, looks a lot better than many of the other GB boards ive seen in recent years.
awesome board, next on my list to buy
I think its £15 overpriced.
Its not overpriced, for what you get its pretty good value. id like to see a few more sata 3 ports however at the price.
Are there compatibility issues with D14>/?
Hi Optical Illusion,
I tested the motherboard with a Phanteks PHTC-14PE which is actually slightly larger than a D14. The only compatibility issue would be with memory featuring large heatspreaders but this is going to be an issue with the D14 on pretty much every motherboard on the market.