Gigabyte P55-UD6 and P55M-UD4 Motherboard Reviews

Look familiar? Since P35 it seems the Gigabyte BIOS layout hasn’t changed much. I appreciate this as it makes navigating the BIOS on a new board a very simple combination of memorized key strokes.

Gigabyte has spiffed up their modified Award BIOS with the motherboard intelligent tweaker. There are sub-menus containing system information, CPU, memory, and voltage menus. I like the temperature and voltage monitoring on the MIT menu but it would have been helpful to also have vQPI included.

The first MIT menu fittingly provides a detailed report of the various CPU and memory settings that you can adjust in the following menus.

Here you can adjust the vast majority of the frequency/multiplier settings. You can adjust the CPU multiplier, memory divider, and the QPI and PCIe PLLs. Within the CPU core menu you can adjust the CPU features such as hyper-threading and the number of active cores.

To fine tune the memory timings and channel turnaround timings you’ve an entire menu at your disposal. In my testing XMP profiles work fine, so have no fear using high-performance modules with XMP profiles.

Here are all the memory timings available to you. Between these two menus you’ve got access the all the timings and sub-timings you could possibly want.

Here you can adjust all the important voltages on the board. For the most part the CPU Vcore, QPI, and DRAM voltages will be all that is necessary to tweak. Dropping CPU PLL has been shown to help, test it out if you are hitting a bclk wall.

The last menu appears to be an after thought by the BIOS engineers. Surprised that these CPU features weren’t stuffed into the CPU sub-menu.

Here you can adjust the system date and time, nothing special to see here.

Here you can adjust the non-overclocking system settings such as boot device and BIOS backups.

Lastly here you can adjust all the integrated peripherals such as the onboard gigabit ethernet ports and the RAID controller built into the P55 PCH.

PC Health lets you monitor a few more voltages than available in the MIT monitor menu. I once again would like to see more voltages monitored, primarily vQPI.