Gigabyte GA-G1975X

     After an easy installation we arrive here at the BIOS screen. Since this is the BIOS screen that most of us have been using since we first put fingers on a keyboard, it's no problem finding all the important settings very quickly. In fact, Gigabyte has done away with the need to press CTRL-F1 at this main menu to unlock all the features of the BIOS. This lets us Overclockers get right right work.

     From the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) we can control all of the important overclocking parameters. The Robust Graphics Booster and CPU Intelligent Accelerator (C.I.A.2) are Gigabyte speed boosting technologies designed to maximize system performance. It takes the right combination of hardware and patience with all the settings the motherboard has to find a combination that works with these kinds of features. So it's nice to have them, but they aren't really necessary to get a good overclock. Once you enable control of the CPU Host Clock Control, you'll be able to change the bus speeds and start your overclocking adventure.

     The CPU host frequency can be set between 100 Mhz and 600 Mhz. That's a raw bus speed BEFORE the quad pump FSB of the CPU itself. The most successful overclock that I've ever seen was using a 300Mhz bus speed. So it seems you'll be digging deeper for a CPU to handle what this board is claiming to supply.

     Another important aspect of Overclocking is the memory multiplier. Since the board officially supports a 266 Mhz (1066 Mhz after quad pump) front side bus, a wide range of multipliers are supplied to enable compatibility with PC2-4300/DDR2-533.

     Another feature meant to speed up the setup process is the Memory Intelligent Booster 2. This is a feature found in almost all Gigabyte motherboard BIOS setup routines and is designed to optimize the memory performance based upon the manufacturer of the installed memory. The above screen shot shows which vendor and brand of memory are compatible with these options.

Available Clock speeds and voltages