The BIOS can essentially be used via two methods. First and default is the new method which is very awkward to use to begin with but we suggest you persevere as it soon becomes more intuitive and very easy to navigate. While it still requires a little work to make it more user friendly, the additional features such as having the monitoring in constant view is very useful. It also looks extraordinary. Better still you can adjust the UEFI BIOS to your own preference. For example if you only want the overclocking options to appear when you enter the BIOS you can select this, perhaps adding the HW monitoring section and CPU features too if you like. Having a good play around with these features means you can pretty much build your own unique BIOS exactly the way you like it, having all of the options you are likely to use directly at your fingertips without having to scroll through a variety of menu's thereby speeding up the whole process. To make the whole thing even better you can change the UEFI to hi resolution too, in effect making it look very much like a Windows overclocking utility. It really does look that good, perhaps even better!
Of course, should you not like all of the visual eye-candy, you can revert to a much more basic design that is perhaps much easier to navigate especially for those who yearn to go back to the days of 8-bit BIOS. Both BIOS versions have pretty much all of the same settings and you can switch to either BIOS version without having to reboot meaning the temporary settings made in one version will be ported over to the other. We struggled at first with the layout of the new BIOS version but after a period of time it began to grown on us. So much so that we rarely entered the old style.
The settings within the BIOS are heavily biased towards overclocking as you would expect. There is a huge array of options to tweak from frequencies to voltages down to a huge array of memory sub-timings. We really couldn't want for more settings. Our only fear is that newcomers to overclocking would perhaps be a little scared off because of the massive lists of settings and one could easily get lost within the submenus or worse, enter a dangerous voltage without knowing. GIGABYTE do for the most part give us a brief explanation of what each settings does however it would also have been nice to indicate in some way what voltage were dangerous and which are deemed 'safe'.
Clearly, this motherboard and indeed this BIOS is not for the feint hearted nor newbies to overclocking. It is the premium motherboard from a premium brand giving the experienced and extreme overclockers every tool possible to extract the most performance from their components. While there are features making life a little less difficult for the newly initiated, we feel GIGABYTE would have been better positioned for a product like this to concentrate more on the dynamics of the BIOS rather than trying to dumb down some of the visuals by making them look prettier and more 'app' like. That said, after a period of time, we came to love this BIOS and it is perhaps the best we have come across to date. It has oodles of features and settings and while it can be a little oppressive at first, it draws you in encouraging you to make those fine adjustments to make a good overclock even better.
