The BIOS
When we powered the system on the first thing we did was go into the BIOS and poke around. Gigabyte uses a Phoenix Award BIOS for the X58A-UD5. Before we get into the advanced stuff, let’s start with the normal features. The advanced BIOS features include your typical options and boot devices. Once thing that I noticed was the Backup BIOS Image to HDD option.
Integrated Peripherals is where you will find all of the options for USB, SATA, LAN, eSATA, etc. The USB keyboard function was disabled at first so make sure you turn it on. Power Management shows you all of the different power options.
The PC Health Status shows you all of your current voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds. There are also a few different options in there. Finally if we go back in to the Standard CMOS features you can see all of your drives.
Ok so now onto the fun stuff, the MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.). Here you will find all of your frequency, voltage, and all the other tweaking and overclocking settings. When you get into the M.I.T. you have five different menus and it lists the BIOS version, BCLK, CPU and Memory frequency, memory size, CPU temperature and the Vcore and DRAM voltages. The M.I.T. status shows you all of the information about your CPU cores and memory, it even shows you your current memory timings.
In the Advanced Frequency Settings menu you will find everything for overclocking your CPU. If we go even deeper into the Advanced CPU Core features we can enable or disable Intel Turbo Boost and other CPU features.
Going into the Advanced Memory Settings you can change the SPD. Here you can also change the timings for each stick of memory in the system. This makes it very easy to set the correct timings. Finally in the Advanced Voltage Settings you can change all of the voltages. Most of the them are set at auto, but they all can be changed.
