Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

This motherboard has its own personalized full screen logo, which you will swifly want to disable to reduce the boot time.


The initial selection screen should be broadly familiar to anyone who has used an Award-based motherboard in the past, and it conveniently lists the GIGABYTE-specific MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) section as the first menu. This is where enthusiasts should expect to spend 99% of their BIOS time.

When you open the M.I.T. section you are greeted with all the essential system clock control options that a serious overclocker needs: CPU & memory multiplier, BLCK, UCLK, QPI Link, PCI-E, etc. Most notably we have access to numerous multipliers for the QPI Link, Uncore, and system memory.


The Advanced CPU Core Features sub-menu, which is where you can enable or disable the various CPU-specific settings like Turbo Boost, the number of cores, multi-threading, C1E, C-state level, Thermal Monitor, Enhanced SpeedStep (EIST), etc.

The Advanced Clock Control sub-menu permits adjustment of the BLCK and PCI-E frequencies. The clock drive and clock skews settings are also present, and set fairly high by default. You should be able to lower them both to 700mV / 700mv for just about any overclock.


In the main M.I.T page, you will need to set the DRAM Timing to Expert to be able to manually set all the memory timings. However, if that's not enough for your liking, the Advanced DRAM Features sub-menu should make your day:


As its name suggests, the Advanced DRAM Features section is where you will find all the memory-related settings. Within this section you can select the memory multiplier, change the performance profile, enter the memory and QPI (VTT/Uncore) voltages, and obviously tweak the memory timings. Each memory channel has its own section, within which you can alter the primary and secondary timings. It had just about every memory setting that an enthusiast or overclock will need to fine-tune their memory modules.


When you scroll to the bottom of the page you are presented with four basic voltages, however when you enter the Advanced Voltage Control sub-menu you get whole range of system voltages.


The Standard CMOS Features section displays all the connected storage devices some basic system memory information, and of course the date and time.


The Integrated Peripherals section is where you can enable or disable all of the various onboard devices (RAID & SATA 6Gb/s controllers, audio, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire, eSATA, GbE LAN, etc).


The Power Management Setup section contains the power management settings linked to the power-saving sleep modes, it also allows you to enable/disable the new EuP standard.

As on most motherboards, the PC Health Status section is a slight disappointment since there is insufficient voltages and temperatures readouts. On a motherboard of this caliber there is no reason not to have all vital voltages available for scrutiny in the bios.


This last screenshot is of the Q-Flash utility which is accessed via the F8 key. Since Q-Flash is built right into the BIOS and it can read files directly from a USB flash drive, BIOS flashing is now a simple and quick procedure. We have never experienced an issue with this well implemented tool, and it has certainly made the flashing process a little less stressful.