Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Review

The BIOS
When you power on the system you can go in to the BIOS and poke around.  The X58-USB3 BIOS is almost identical to the one used on the X58A-UD5 motherboard we reviewed a little while ago.  The BIOS used is a Phoenix Award BIOS, this is currently the F2 version of the BIOS.  The main screen has many options, which we will get in to.  If you press F8 you can go into the Q-Flash utility, which allows you to update the BIOS or save it to a flash drive.

Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard

The Standard CMOS features list your drives, which we don’t see any right now.  The advanced BIOS features include your typical options and boot devices.  Once thing that I noticed was the Backup BIOS Image to HDD option.

Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard

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.

Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard

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 5 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.

Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard

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.  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.

Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58-USB3 Intel X58 Motherboard

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