BIOS and Overclocking
The AMD 780G chipset motherboards like this Gigabyte model we are testing today are going to have more overclocking options that you are used to seeing on any IGP-based mATX motherboards. The AMD 690G did this as well but the RS780 chipset takes it a step further.
In the first BIOS screen we are showing here you select what types of outputs you would like to use; since you can only utilize one of the digital output at a time you need to select either the DVI or HDMI to pair with the standard VGA output.
You can adjust the amount of frame buffer than the Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H motherboard uses for integrated Radeon 3200 graphics.
Enabling SurroundView will allow you to run Hybrid CrossFire and also use up to four monitors (two on each GPU) without having to disable and re-enable CrossFire all the time. A welcome addition to the CrossFire line!!!
Here you can select where the frame buffer memory is located in address space: either above or below the 4GB mark. This is useful for users of 32-bit operating systems that want to have as much memory as possible available to the OS.
The overclocking section of the BIOS looks much more like a standard ATX enthusiast menu than that of an IGP motherboard.
The memory configuration is completely customizable as you can see with support for all the most common timing settings while through in some extreme tweaking options as well.
Here’s an interesting BIOS option: the ability to overclock the core speed of the integrate graphics on the 780G chipset. Its stock speed is 500 MHz in most cases but AMD has demoed it running up as high as 750 MHz in testing documents we have seen here. This is definitely a cool feature to see in an IGP motherboard and I think most users will be able to push more out of the chipset pretty easily.
These two screens show the CPU overclocking options including the primary frequency and multiplier settings.
These three voltage controls should give you the necessary flexibility to overclock your processor and memory very reliably and we are glad to see these types of features in the lowest-cost motherboards. Everyone should have the option to be an enthusiast!
Of course, if you don’t want to use the BIOS for your overclocking needs, you can still utilize AMD’s Overdrive utility that allows you to do most of this dirty work right from Windows.
Of course, if you don’t want to use the BIOS for your overclocking needs, you can still utilize AMD’s Overdrive utility that allows you to do most of this dirty work right from Windows.
The only option we didn’t see in the AOD tool is the ability to overclock the integrate GPU from Windows – a bit disappointing since that was our favorite new BIOS option. Some of the voltage tweaks like the memory and chipset adjustments are also inaccessible.
