Application Overview
Included Applications
- App Center
- @BIOS
- 3D OSD
- AutoGreen
- BIOS Setup
- Cloud Station
- Color Temperature
- EasyTune
- Fast Boot
- Game Boost
- ON/OFF Charge
- RGB Fusion
- Smart Backup
- Smart Keyboard
- Smart TimeLock
- System Information Viewer
- USB Blocker
- USB DAC UP 2
- V-Tuner
- Norton® Internet Security (OEM version)
- cFosSpeed
- XSplit Gamecaster + Broadcaster (12 months license)
GIGABYTE APP Center
GIGABYTE APPs tab
Windows settings tab
The GIGABYTE APP Center provides a centralized location for all the GIGABYTE Windows-based utilities. The interface splits apps across three tabs – GIGABYTE APPs, Windows settings, and Third-Party Software. The GIGABYTE APPs tab houses all GIGABYTE developed applets (discussed below). The Windows settings tab houses Windows Admin and Control Panel / Settings applets. The Third-Party Software tab houses non-GIGABYTE applets, like the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility applet on the Intel side of things. The @BIOS applet can be used to backup and update the board BIOS. The EasyTune utility can be used to configure board settings, including bus speeds and voltages. The System Information Viewer (SIV) applet displays board component information, monitored device information, and provides an interface for automated or manual fan configuration. Fast Boot provides the user a GUI interface to modify the BIOS Fast Boot setting and the OS-based power loss setting. The Smart Keyboard applet allows the user to create customized keyboard and mouse hot keys and macros. The Cloud Station app allows the for interaction with and control of the base system from a remote device via a wireless connection. The Smart TimeLock applet allows the user to define computer and Internet usage time for a user via its rules-based interface. The Smart Backup applet controls time-based system backups with the ability to create a new partition image file one time per hour. The USB Blocker applet is a security mechanism allowing you to block specific types of USB devices and access. The RGB Fusion applet allows for user configuration of the color and operating mode of the board integrated LEDs and LEDs connected to the RGB 12V header. The Auto Green applet gives user control over the board’s power saving features. The Fast Boot applet gives user access to the board Fast Boot settings. The 3D OSD provides access to system monitored information via an in-game interface. The USB DAC-UP 2 applet allows for adjustment of the voltage supplied via the integrated USB 3.0 ports and headers. The V-Tune applet gives the user access to monitor and adjust performance settings for supported video cards.
EasyTune
The GIGABYTE EasyTune applet provides access to board settings, including voltage, bus speeds, ratios, memory timings, and fan operation can be manually manipulated through the easy to use GUI interface. Speed presets are also available for automated overclocking using the applet. The applet provides a hot key interface to bind up to two user configured overclocking profiles to multi-key settings.
Advanced CPU OC tab
Advanced DDR OC tab
Advanced Power tab
Hotkey tab
Hardware Monitor interface
System Information Viewer
The GIGABYTE System Information Viewer applet provides access to board information concerning the CPU, memory, and attached devices. The System Information Viewer window becomes visible by clicking the left arrow icon from the Hardware Monitor window. The applet also provides access to a recorder interface to record values of monitored items over time. You can view the monitored items via a graph interface. Additionally, fans attached to the integrated headers can be configured using pre-determined op-modes or manually via the SmartFan 5 Advanced tab.
Smart Fan 5 Auto tab
Smart Fan 5 Advanced tab
Smart Fan 5 System Alert tab
Smart Fan 5 Record tab, Voltage tab
RGB Fusion
The RGB Fusion applet controls the active state of the RGB LEDs embedded in to the board as well as LED strips connected to the board’s RGB LED 12V header. The controlled LEDs can be configured for any desired color using the color picker control and to operate in a variety of modes including pulse, music, color cycle, static, flash, random, wave, double flash, and demo. With the applet operating in Advanced mode, the board LEDS can be configured independently of an LED strip connected to the 12V RGB LED header. Advanced mode supports a total of six operation modes including pulse, static, flash, double flash, color cycle, and custom. Additionally, the user can configure up to three profiles. Intelligent mode supports led configuration based on temperature and system usage parameters.
Advanced mode page
Intelligent mode page
3D OSD
The GIGABYTE 3D OSD applet provides an in-game interface for real-time viewing of system performance, including FPS, CPU speed, system temperature, etc. The interface can be customized to show in several color styles and screen locations, as well as customized as to what system data is shown tracking. The applet also provides hotkey functionality to quickly show and dismiss the overlay as well as Profile support to load and save configured settings.
Display Setting tab
Apply To tab
Game Boost
The AORUS Game Boost applet attempts to optimize system performance by terminating unecessary applications to free up memory and CPU cycles prior to starting a gaming session. The Revert function restores any shutdown processes when invoked.
Smart HUD
The AORUS Smart HUD applet allows for in game viewing of video streams. The position, reolution, and transparency of the streaming window can be configured so that the video does not detract from game play.
V-Tuner
The V-Tuner applet provides access to real-time monitoring information for the system graphics card’s core speed, memory speed, and GPU utilization. Various card settings, including core and memory speeds, as well as card voltages, can be manually manipulated through the sliders in the GUI interface. Additionally, the applet provides the user with the ability to customize up to for settings profiles.
USB DAC-UP 2
The USB DAC-UP 2 applet allows the end user to configure the power supplied to attached USB devices via the integrated USB 3.0 ports and headers. The ports and headers can be configured to provided default power, no power, or > default power of up to +0.3V.
“Support for NVIDIA® Quad-GPU
“Support for NVIDIA® Quad-GPU SLI™ and 2-Way NVIDIA® SLI™ technologies
Support for AMD Quad-GPU CrossFire™ and 2-Way AMD CrossFire™ technologies”
With only 3 PICe X16 Slots(Whatever electrical) how is Quad GPU SLI/CF support possible on this MB? Can this board somehow be plugged into the Delorean and initiate time travel, it sure has enough LED Bling to qualify as a prop for a 1980s SIFI comedy.
No you dr emmet brown
No you dr emmet brown wannabe. Quad sli/xfire is for cards that have TWO gpus on each card, like the titanz( must say titanz wirh heavy german accent) or like the 295 x2.
Really the drivers are going
Really the drivers are going to abstract away Ze dual GPUs on Ze one PCIe card mostly so that’s not what CF/SLI is about. AMD’s CF uses XDMA while Nvidia uses a hardware bridge. But still you are wrong about this MB as it has only 3 PCIe x16(whatever electrical slots) and some folks in the past have had 4 of those Dual GPU on one PCIe card SKUs on a single system. This MB can not support 4 different cards at the same time so that’s just BS on your part!
CF and SLI are still not very good at milti-GPU load balancing but maybe with DX12/Vulkan and that explicit GPU Multi-Adaptor managed by these new Graphics APIs and some games programmers that are competent and not whining script Kiddies then there can be more progess. It should not be a problem for most GPUs that can work with DX12/Vulkan to have proper APIs developed to hand hold the stupid script kiddies hands and automate the process of proper GPU load balancing under DX12/Vulkan or even Apple’s metal. Poor little “programmers” so wedded to OpenGL’s complex and software abstracted state machine design that they can not deal with any GPU metal. But that’s OK as there will be middleware and Game Engine’s SDKs to help.
CF/SLI is not so good for games because of all that single threaded latency issues in dealing with milti-GPUs but really GPUs are parallel beasts and newer CPUs are getting way more cores and threads on mainstream CPU SKUs. So with proper programmers and DX12/Vulkan/etc that can be fixed over time. Nvidia sure is not receptive to more than 2 GPUs for SLI and AMD needs to maybe go back to using Bridge Connectors instead of XDMA and make use of Infinity Fabric instead. Nvidia has NVLink that it could speak across its bridge connectors but Nvidia appears to not be as interested in muiti-GPU uasge for gaming just yet.
The entire gaming/gaming engine industry mostly is really not taking the time to properly hide the latency issues with their games and are relying too much on the CPU and GPU makers to throw ever more powerful hardware their way so they do not have to worry about optimizing PC games as much as the console games/gaming engine makers have to do in order to eke out every last bit of performance on those consoles relatively weak hardware.
Really both AMD and Nvidia maybe need to slow down on the New hardware features and spend more time optimizing their GPUs firmware/driver and API support but Nvidia makes loads of dosh with its new hardware sales at the expense of its older GPU hardware while maybe AMD open sourceing most of their Vulkan driver development will see some Older AMD hardware(GCN 1.2/later) continue to net performance gains over time.
Poor AMD(At the Time) bit off more than they could chew trying to get That Implicit primitive shader API layer to work for legacy games that are not written to take advantage of the Explicit Primitive Shader hardware in AMD’s Vega GPU micro-arch. But gaming engine makers are still free to target Vega’s Explicit Hardware Primitive Shaders even if that’s going to not catch on as soon as AMD had hoped for PC gaming. Maybe the Open Source community can get around to targeting Vega’s explicit primitive hardware shaders or that Chinese Console maker that’s using That New AMD Semi-Custom Zen/Vega APU. Once the Console Makers switch over to all Zen/Vega based console hardware you can be damned sure that they will target Vega’s Explicit Primitive Hardware shaders and Rapid Packed Math/etc.
The marketing wank is “NVIDIA
The marketing wank is “NVIDIA Quad-GPU SLI”. It is not “NVIDIA® Quad-card SLI”. How do you get Quad-GPU SLI on a system that features 2-way SLI? Get two graphics cards with two GPUs each, and there you have Quad-GPU SLI. Also, from the horses mouth: http://www.nvidia.com/object/slizone_quadsli.html
So yes, that “dr emmet brown wannabe” is right, you annoying brat…
Oopsie, the
Oopsie, the “Anonymousnameisalreadyused” was right, not the “dr. emmet brown wannabe”… Argh…
thanks for the review
morry,
thanks for the review
morry, do you know what the ‘EDC %’ is at stock and when overclocking? ryzen master monitors this metric
i am running a 2700x on a asrock fatality mini itx 470 in an in win 901 case and at stock ‘EDC’ is hitting max, so i am assuming that is why it is stuck at around 3900 on all cores when running cinebench
it could be temps as well, but the noctua i am using is excellent, and it is the same with the cooler master aio i tried before the noctua
i think the issue is that the vrm is not beefy enough to fully max out the cpu because i believe ‘EDC’ is the max current the vrm is able to handle
Just a slight correction you
Just a slight correction you might want to make in the Features and Motherboard Layout section. I was a bit confused when I read the below, so I doubled checked this in the manufacturers manual.
Note that the port M2A_SOCKET and the tertiary PCIe x16 slot share bandwidth. The PCIe x16 slot is disabled with an M.2 drive seated in that port.
This should read that the “M2B_SOCKET and the tertiary PCIe x16 slot share bandwidth.”
Sourced from the manufacturers manual, Page 7, Expansion Slots section:
1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4)
* The PCIEX4 slot becomes unavailable when a device is installed in the M2B_SOCKET connector.
Hope this clears up any confusion.
Thanks for pointing this
Thanks for pointing this out. It has been updated…
Any thoughts on getting
Any thoughts on getting around the M.2 80mm slot performance problem by using a PCI-E 3.0 compliant adapter card in the second 16x slot? I know this would drop the first two slots to 8x speeds, but most real world bench marking seems to suggest only little performance loss overall if a graphics card is in the first slot?
Anyone think it’s worth the trade off?
worth it if you need to run
worth it if you need to run two or more M.2s in raid mode. You won't see much if any performance loss between 16x and 8x on the video card unless you are running 4k most likely….
Thanks for the reply on this
Thanks for the reply on this one Morry.
One more question I had was
One more question I had was around RAM and this board. Given what you noted in the review about the memory speeds and this board, is there much point in going above DDR4-3200? I’m planning to overclock my Ryzen 2700X to around 4.2 GHz paired with a GTX 1080Ti. I had been looking at some Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3600 up until I read through the review. Thoughts?
no, not much point going
no, not much point going above stock speeds on memory, you see little improvement performance wise. Best to try to maximize your core speeds…
Appreciate the quick reply
Appreciate the quick reply again Morry!