Gigabyte EP45-DS3R P45 Motherboard Review

Software and Tools

The Gigabyte EP45-DS3R motherboard comes with an installation disk containing drivers needed for the board as well as a few additional programs and tools. Navigating the disk, users will find chipset, audio, and LAN drivers. Gigabyte Utilities are found under the Application Software page and include: EasyTune6, Gigabyte Online Manager, DMI Viewer, Face-Wizard, @BIOS, Q-Share, Time Repair, and Update Manager. In addition, Gigabyte provides some extra software: Norton Internet Security, Kaspersky Antivirus, Acrobat Reader, WinZip, COREL MediaOne, Browser Configuration Utility, and RealTek Green Feature. As you can see there is no lack of tools and software included with the EP45-DS3R! We are not going to go deeper into every tool and utility, but let's take a look at the Gigabyte tool we found most useful, EasyTune6.


EasyTune6

EasyTune6 is a complete motherboard management tool which allows users to manage and monitor hardware resources as well as tweak their system settings in order to achieve maximum system performance. Whether you are an overclocking enthusiast, or a computer novice, EasyTune6 provides the tools you need to quickly and effortlessly fine tune your system.


The first two screens of EasyTune6 look very similar to CPUID’s overclocking staple, CPU-Z. All of the CPU and memory information needed is included in these two screens.


The next tab in EasyTuner6 is titled “Tuner” and is where overclockers will spend the majority of their time. First there are easy and advanced modes and separate tabs for frequency and voltages. The frequency tab contains all of the clockgen items and users are able to alter FSB, multiplier, and PCIE frequency. The voltage tab includes all voltages available in the BIOS and saves a TON of time when compared to tweaking one setting in the BIOS and rebooting. If your specific system has been pre-tested by Gigabyte, a QuickBoost tab is also included under tuner.


The next tab gave us a pleasant surprise by providing video card overclocking settings. This type of tweakability is very rare with motherboard tools and users should love the ability to overclock a GPU without installing extra programs like RivaTuner. The Smart tab includes the C.I.A.2 feature and SmartFan. SmartFan is a fan speed controller; however we could not test this since we are watercooled and didn’t use any fans powered from motherboard headers. C.I.A.2. stands for CPU Intelligent Accelerator and provides the ability for novice overclockers to do slight overclocks with the click of a button. Our experience with this feature was mostly negative since Turbo and Full Thrust both led to Windows freezing. Upon rebooting it was necessary to disable this feature in the BIOS to reload Windows.


The last tab in EasyTuner6 is the hardware monitor. Here you can see CPU, RAM, 3.3v, and 12v, voltages as well as temperatures for the CPU and system. Similar to the BIOS settings, there are also safeguards that can be setup to ensure temperatures remain in check.

Overall we think this tool has just about everything we would ever need. Instead of using many individual programs such as SetFSB, RivaTuner, CPUZ, etc, Gigabtye provides everything in one very handy tool!