BIOS Features
The BIOS on the Gigabyte 965P-DS3 isn’t going to win any awards for flexibility or overclocking options, but it has a surprisingly high number of features for such a low cost solution.
In our first BIOS screen you can see that Gigabyte has laid out all the Intel processor power saving options in good detail, with the abbreviations next to them (C1E) and allows the user to fully configure them as they wish.
The hardware monitor screen in the BIOS has some basic temperatures and fan speeds, and indicates voltages only with an “OK” when they fall within the acceptable ranges. There are some basic temperature controls as well here to allow the system to warn the user of failing fans or escalated temperatures.
Getting into the overclocking options, you can see the multiplier options here from 6x to 10x (the CPU’s default multiplier).
You can push the FSB on the motherboard up to 600 MHz! Well, at least they are giving you options here, but 600 is a bit out of our range for now…
You can adjust the PCI Express bus frequency from 100 MHz up to 150 MHz.
Gigabyte’s custom auto-overclocking options can be set here with such descriptive settings as “Cruise” and “Racing”…umm how about no? If they want this stuff used, we need to see some hard documentation of what it is doing to our (and more importantly, your!) expensive and valuable hardware.
The memory multiplier can be set here as well, based off of the set FSB.
The memory timings can be adjusted here; though only the major and most important timings are accessible.
The DDR2 memory voltages can be adjusted up to +0.6v over default.
The PCIe voltages can be bumped JUST slightly by a tenth of a volt; 0.1v.
The FSB voltage can be upped as well by 0.3v.
The voltage the Intel processors can be increased to is 2.0v flat.
A setting that we saw Asus start using a couple of years ago, this is supposed to increase the speed of the graphics sub-system by overclocking the GPUs somewhat — we’d always recommend leaving this in a disabled opton — IF WE WERE GIVEN ONE!
