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Gigabyte GA EP45 DQ6 Motherboard
M.I.T. MB Intelligent Tweaker
Graphics Booster
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MIT Menu |
Graphics Booster |
Gigabyte offers an option in the M.I.T. menu called graphics booster which comes in 2 options: Auto and Turbo which are meant to increase the performance of the cards. The differences in performance is very small, although "Turbo" mode comes up just over the "Fast" mode in terms of frames per second.
CPU Control
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CPU Control Section |
Advanced Clock Control |
While looking at the CPU control menu, I noticed a slight difference to the CPU control menu on this board, from one I was previously using (680i from XFX). Instead of displaying the FSB frequency already multiplied out, this particular bios shows the frequency of each core (400 MHz FSB would give you a total of 400x4 or 1600 MHz FSB).
The Advanced clock control offers more options such as the ability to manipulate the PCI and CPU sekews and drives.
RAM Control
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RAM Control Section |
Advanced Timing Control |
RAM controls for the GA-EP45-DQ6 are slightly different from what I had expected. The motherboard does not offer the ability to unlink the RAM speeds from the CPU. Instead it uses latches and multipliers. It then lets you configure the RAM speeds based on the speed of the CPU. While this idea does have advantages, the result for my case was problematic. Since the RAM is directly tied into the CPU, I was unable to achieve 1200 MHz RAM (stock RAM speed) at default 2.4 GHz of the Q6600. The only way for me to get 1200 MHz out of RAM was only through overclocking the CPU. The latches available are the following: 200, 266, 333, and 400 MHz while the multipliers range from 2.00 to 4.00.
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Memory Latches |
Memory Multipliers |
Voltages
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Voltage Section |
Voltage Search |
There are plenty of advanced voltage settings available to fine tune your overclock. If you are unfamiliar with the advanced settings, it is best to leave them on "Auto" since the motherboard is perfectly capable of achieving a 40% overclock without needing any user Voltage input.
I was, however, a bit disappointed with the voltage controller of the motherboard as the finest steps it can do were of 0.02 V while the Kingston HyperX's output peaked at 2.35. In comparison, the processor voltage steps were 0.0125 V which provided excellent stability on that end.
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