Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

With a motherboard of this caliber we expected a top-notch BIOS, and thankfully Gigabyte have delivered both in terms of functionality and layout.


The initial selection screen should be broadly familiar to anyone who has recently used a Gigabyte motherboard, and it wisely lists the M.I.T. section (that’s where all the fun happens!) as the first option.


We likey, we likey a lot. CPU multiplier, front side bus, PCI-E bus, northbridge latch, memory multiplier… what an initial greeting! And it gets even better as you scroll down to reveal the “Mother Board Votlage Control” (Spell check anyone?). Aside from a southbridge voltage option, Gigabyte has provided every voltage option that users should require to extract every last megahertz from their components. Not only are there a lot of voltage options, but the individual adjustments are extremely liberal as you can see below:

In summary, overclockers will definitely feel at home tinkering within the shiny blue confines of MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) section and its abundant voltages tweaking capabilities. Just make sure that you use these voltages sensibly, as Gigabyte have provided enough leeway for you to damage any and all components.

Now you may have noticed the “Advanced Timing Control” option in the third screenshot. This is where all the memory overclocking magic happens.


This sub-menu gives you access to some of the important sub-timings, but mostly important reveals four more sub-menus. In the “Timings Settings” menus, you get access to the Static tRead Value, which is Gigabyte’s word for the all-important tRD or Performance Level. If you are particularly knowledgeable, you can also tweak the tRD phase adjustment and the DIMM Clock Skews. In the “Driving Settings” menus, we can adjust the memory driving strength, which is a very rare option to find in most BIOSes. Gigabyte has wisely chosen to provide Drive Strength Profiles (667/800/1066/OC-1200/OC-1333), as to take the guess work out of these fairly obscure options.

By adding all these extra options, Gigabyte has definitely pushed this BIOS into elite company, and it should satisfy all but the most fanatical BIOS tweakers.


Here we have the Advanced BIOS Features section, which allows you to set boot device priority, enable/disable Intel’s various CPU-specific technologies, and tweak a few other boot-up related settings. The Integrated Peripherals section allows you to enable/disable all of the various onboard devices (RAID, audio, USB, FireWire, LAN, etc).


The PC Health Status section is the first real disappointment encountered in the BIOS, as there is a distinct lack of voltages and temperatures being reported. Since this is a high-end motherboard, we would have liked to see Gigabyte include a few additional readouts, for example vDIMM, vMCH, vSB and also the MCH temperature. The second screen enables/disable the Infineon Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and we can’t help but wonder why they did not simply add this option to the Integrated Peripherals section.


This last screenshot is of the Q-Flash utility that is accessed via the F8 key. It is very straight forward and quite simple to get a BIOS quickly flashed. We did some flashing to and from BIOS files through Q-Flash using a USB thumb drive and not once had a problem. Being built right into the BIOS eliminates the step of creating a boot disk and makes it as simple as dropping the BIOS file on a thumb drive and rebooting to the BIOS. Yet another very nice feature well implemented into the GA-EP45T-Extreme BIOS.

Overall. Gigabyte have done a great job with this BIOS. While we are a little disappointed by the lack of voltage and temperature readouts, the superb MB Intelligent Tweaker section more than makes up for this shortcoming. On a side note, and this is a nitpicky detail, we do find the BIOS to be a bit sluggish at times, occasionally hesitating to scroll up or down.