BIOS Interface

While it may be technically considered a budget motherboard, Gigabyte’s made no compromises when it comes to the GA-EX58-UD3R’s BIOS interface: it’s just as fully-featured as Gigabyte’s flagship EX58-EXTREME motherboard. Feature-for-feature, both boards are practically identical: right down to the same voltage options and eight available slots for custom BIOS profiles.

This is good news for enthusiasts who would like to OC their GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard and may have been concerned that Gigabyte may have made some compromises to the BIOS. That’s definitely not the case here.


This can be both a good thing, and a bad thing. It’s good for enthusiasts who are well versed in OC’ing, but because this BIOS is literally loaded with a bevy of different options, it could be a bad thing for inexperienced users who don’t know what they’re doing. For instance, Gigabyte provides CPU voltages settings up to 1.9V in the UD3R’s BIOS. If a newbie were to accidentally dial in 1.9V of juice for his brand new Core i7-920 on stock Intel cooling, it would most likely result in a very bad day as his CPU is fried right before his eyes. Fortunately Gigabyte color-codes the voltage options with their latest F4 BIOS with gray for lower voltages, bright purple for moderate voltage options (1.55-1.59375V), and red for the extreme voltage settings (1.6V+).


Gigabyte provides so many settings inside the GA-EX58-UD3R’s BIOS for tweaking that they’ve had to resort to multiple submenus for options such as CPU features, memory timings, and QPI multipliers. You can perform some basic functions for these topics under the main menu of MB Intelligent Tweaker, but you’ll want to navigate to the submenu option for the deep dive where more settings for fine tuning are available. For instance, to enable/disable the Core i7’s Turbo Mode function, you’ll need to navigate to the MB Intelligent Tweaker menu, then go to the Advanced CPU Features submenu.



Normally we hate it when manufacturers provide submenu after submenu, as navigation can get kind of frustrating when you need to find that one setting before exiting BIOS, but thankfully Gigabyte places the settings in the proper areas so navigating through the UD3R’s BIOS was a breeze. We’re actually in agreement for once with Gigabyte’s thoughtful use of submenus, as placing the myriad number of settings available within the submenus would make the MB Intelligent Tweaker page way too long: it would literally be a keyboard scrollfest as you go from setting to setting.

But enough talk, let’s get to the settings you’ll need for OC’ing your CPU shall we?

As any Core i7 OC’er knows, the most important setting you’ll need when OC’ing your CPU is the base clock frequency setting. Here Gigabyte definitely doesn’t disappoint, as the company offers speeds ranging from 100-1200MHz inside BIOS! The speeds are available in 1MHz increments, so you can fine tune base clock speeds to your heart’s content.


While the GA-EX58-UD3R originally shipped with memory multiplier options providing speeds up to 2.0GHz, with the latest BIOS you can now dial the memory up to 2.4GHz! More specifically, settings of 800MHz, 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz, 1867MHz, 2133MHz, and 2400MHz are available.

Because Gigabyte provides so many voltage options inside BIOS, we’ve included this handy chart which summarizes the most common available settings:

GA-EX58-UD3R Voltage Options in BIOS
CPU	0.5V-1.9V in 0.00625-0.02V increments
QPI/VTT	VARIES. F1 BIOS: 1.075V-1.615V in 0.02V increments F4 BIOS: 1.075V-1.495V in 0.02V increments
DRAM	1.3-2.6V in 0.02-0.1V increments
IOH	1.0V-1.50V
CPU PLL	1.8-2.52V in 0.02-0.04V increments
PCIe	1-2.14V in 0.02-0.1V increments
QPI PLL	0.8-1.6V in 0.02-0.1V increments
ICH I/O	1.05-2.5V in 0.02-0.05V increments
ICH core	0.92-2.38V in 0.02-0.1V increments
DRAM termination	0.52-1.225V in 0.02-0.025V increments

If you want to go even further than those DRAM voltage options, you can even adjust the voltages for each memory channel if you wish.


Even the most seasoned enthusiast will be pleased by the BIOS settings provided inside the GA-EX58-UD3R’s BIOS.

Overclocking

So how far were we able to OC our EX58-UD3R motherboard? How does 203MHz sound!? At higher speeds the system would BSOD in Windows Vista 64-bit. Overall we were pretty happy with our OC’ing results, this was actually 6MHz higher than the speeds we got with the ASUS P6T, which maxed out at 197MHz with 100% complete stability (although we could run some apps at speeds as high as 209MHz, just not with full stability).