BIOS

Moving into the BIOS; GIGABYTE has made a few aesthetic changes this time around. The same blue Award BIOS is used for the base, however GIGABYTE has moved the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker(M.I.T) menu from the top of the right hand menu to the very first one selected when entering the BIOS.

Buses

CPU Host Frequency: 100 - 1200 MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCIE Frequency: 100 - 150 MHz in 1MHz Increments

Voltages

CPU VCore: 0.50v to 2.3v in 0.00625v increments

CPU Term Voltage: 1.1v to 1.7v in 0.02v increments

CPU PLL Voltage: 1.5v to 2.81v in various increments

CPU Reference: 0.76v to 1.010v in Various increments

MCH Core: 1.1v to 2.0v in 0.02v increments

MCH Reference: 0.76v to 1.040v in Various Increments

MCH/DRAM Reference: 0.9v to 1.76v in 0.02v increments

ICH I/O: 1.5v to 2.31v in 0.02v Increments

ICH Reference: 1.1v to 1.4v in 0.1v increments

DRAM Voltage: 1.45v to 3.02v in 0.02v increments

DRAM Termination: 70.9v to 1.355v in Various increments

Channel A Reference: 0.9v to 1.76v in 0.02v increments

Channel B Reference: 0.9v to 1.76v in 0.02v increments

Overclocking

With all of the extra tweaking options on tap, we expected to see a very high overclock from the board. However, the P43 is not all that good at overclocking the FSB. We only managed to hit 512 MHz with this board, so we were a bit disappointed. However, we have revised our overclocking criteria; anything past 500MHz we still consider a very impressive result, where 450 MHz to 500 MHz is just acceptable. Anything from 400 to 450 is really not that good considering 400 MHz FSB is standard on the high-end Intel chips.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.