BIOS – Overview
The GA-G1975X BIOS starts off looking like any other BIOS that is until you get to the MIT menu. The MIT (short for “Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker”) is where you find all the overclocking and tweaking options available on the G1975X – it’s great to see all these options accessible in one place instead of spread out all over different BIOS menus and screens.
At a glance, the BIOS does not provide much information about the status of current voltages and frequencies aside from the current CPU voltage and the memory frequency. You will have to boot into Windows and use Everest, CPU-Z or Sandra to get that info.
The CPU multiplier is adjustable from 14x up to your CPU’s default multiplier. In my case it was 14x to 18x.
Robust Graphics Booster is a dynamic graphics “overclocking” feature which works well in our tested games. More on this feature on the next section.
CIA 2 (or “CPU Intelligent Accelerator”) dynamically adjusts the bus frequency depending on the load on the CPU. This feature works great as long as you have decent overclocking CPU and memory. This would be an interesting feature to use along with the SmartFan control. We evaluate this feature in the Overclocking Features section.
You can set independent frequencies for CPU (100-600 MHz), PCI-E (90-150 MHz), and PCI bus (33.3 – 37.5 MHz).
The memory multiplier is a bit odd since it does not follow the labelling standard used by many other motherboard manufacturer. Instead of the familiar net frequency vocabulary ( i.e. 400MHz, 533MHz, etc.), Gigabyte uses multiplier numbers (2.0, 2.66, etc.).
Memory voltage can also be adjusted, however in our testing this option does not seem to work. Regardless of what voltage setting I used, it would always reset to the default VMem upon rebooting. More about this issue in the next section.
Voltages can also be set for the PCI-Express (+0.1V to +0.7V), the front-side bus (+0.05V to +0.35V), and the CPU (1.0625V to 1.75V).
Memory adjustments take the form of the typical four timing settings.
There is also an interesting setting called MIB2 which allows you to set the memory timing by module manufacturer. However in practice this does not work perfectly as the MIB2 timings (4-4-4-15) were actually slower than the default SPD timings for the Corsair modules we were using (4-4-4-12).
