BIOS Features
Gigabyte is serious about getting the X38-DQ6 in the hands of overclockers and enthusiasts and proved it by providing no less than four BIOS revisions from the time we got the board to when this review went up.
The PC monitoring section of the BIOS is pretty standard now, with support for viewing the standard voltages, fan speeds (none of which are attached here) as well as the temperature of the processor. You can also set your fan failure and temperature warning limits here as well.
The MIT section (motherboard intelligent tweaker) section is where all of the overclocking magic takes place and you can see spots for FSB adjustments, memory speed changes and more.
The CPU multiplier can be adjusted down to 6x, which is the lowest current Intel CPUs support. The limit going up will be whatever the default multiplier is on your retail processor.
The front-side bus on the motherboard can be adjust from 100 MHz to 700 MHz (or 400 MHz to 2800 MHz quad-pumped) allowing room for some extreme overclocking headroom.
The PCI Express 2.0 bus can be moved from the default 100 MHz up to 150 MHz.
The Gigabyte CIA2 feature attempts to overclock your processor as the system load increases on it, theoretically increasing performance and power consumption only when you need it the most. There are several un-descriptive names and options here that really don’t help the user out at all.
Gigabyte is known for odd options in the BIOS that are never explained and here is another: Performance Enhance. The red side note says that system stability might increase during overclocking if you set this option to Standard…well then what the hell is it for??
The Gigabyte memory multiplier settings are bit more confusing than they should be but are setup in a way that you can figure out what you need from the descriptions on the right.
Basically, you need to determine what FSB your processor runs at (in our case 333 MHz for our test CPU) and then set the multiplier that ends with that corresponding letter. So, for a 2x multiplier with my CPU, I’d pick the “2.00B” option.
