Quick Look at Software Bundle

You may have noticed that Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 is bundled not with a CD disk but with a DVD disk. As a result, the manufacturer managed to include not only the whole bunch of drivers for the chipset, network cards, SATA controllers, USB and CD-ROM, but also a lot of additional applications and utilities:

• Norton Internet Security 2008;
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus;
• Acrobat Reader;
• Microsoft DirectX;
• WinZip;
• COREL MediaOne;
• Google Browser Configuration Utility;
• Realtek Green Feature;
• Dolby GUI Software;
• Roxio Buzz 2.

Besides the above listed third-party software items, the DVD disk also contains a few Gigabyte’s own brand name utilities:

• G.O.M. (Gigabyte Online Manager);
• EasyTune 6;
• DMI Viewer;
• Face-Wizard;
• @BIOS;
• Q-Share;
• Time Repair;
• Update Manager.

It is very convenient to work with this disk. The autorun analyzes your OS status and offers to install the entire set of drivers and utilities at once. You can settle for custom install of selected applications, look through the brief description of their functionality and check for updates.

The only small inconvenience is that some utilities are offered for Xpress Install together with the drivers that is why they are located in the corresponding part of the disk and not among other utilities. As a result, we couldn’t at first find Dynamic Energy Saver among other utilities and mistakenly believed that it was not on the disk (you can see it on the screenshot above: the first in the list).

Of course, if we decided to discuss all this software and utilities in detail, we would have needed to write a separate review, and maybe not even one. Therefore, we are not going to dwell on any third-party applications here, even though there are a few very useful ones, that are definitely worth checking out. In fact, you can always find the detailed description of the functionality on the developer sites. Now that we decided to focus only in Gigabyte’s brand name utilities, we will have to cover much fewer titles.

For example, Gigabyte EasyTune 6 is a really great tool. It allows monitoring system parameters, even overclocking from Windows. It would be especially useful for overclockers, because it shows what voltages the mainboard sets during overclocking.

We have already discussed this utility in detail in our Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3 mainboard review, so we are not going to repeat it here.

DES (Dynamic Energy Saver) is responsible for power-saving technologies on Gigabyte mainboards. We have also discussed its functionality in our Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 mainboard review. However, this time they offered us a new revision called Gigabyte Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced. We downloaded the latest version B8.0905.1 from Gigabyte’s official web-site.

We have seen no noticeable differences from the previous “not-advanced” version, except the “Advanced” word. Now, however, the utility can also work during CPU overclocking. During CPU overclocking by raising the processor Vcore the CPU power consumption increases significantly, there is no way to select any power-saving modes, but the utility still works.

By the way, you don’t need to have this utility running in order to save some power. Just adjust the necessary settings and close the application. In this case the selected power-saving mode will remain enabled and you will use the power more efficiently.

Finally, there are a few utilities that are not worth dwelling on. Among them we should mention Gigabyte Xpress Recovery2. It is not in the list of Gigabyte’s brand name utilities, too, but it will launch from the DVD disk if you press F9 on boot-up. Surprisingly, there is a second version of this program already 9incompatible with the first one, by the way), which means they keep working on it. I wonder who actually uses this tool?

Theoretically, it is an extremely useful tool. It allows you to save a compressed image of the operating system and restore it if necessary in its initial condition. However, there are too many limitations that nullify all its advantages. First of all, this utility supports only FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS file systems. Although it is based on a Linux core itself. Moreover, it doesn’t support hard disk drives in RAID arrays or AHCI mode. The utility saves this image in the end of the physical drive, so you have to leave free unlabeled space when partitioning your HDD. How much space do we need? No one knows, it all depends on the OS and the space it takes on your disk. And if there is not enough space left, you will have to partition your drive all over again and reinstall the operating system.

I believe we have listed enough inconveniences for someone to give up this tool. However, I was most of all shocked with the system requirements this tool sets that were mentioned in the mainboard manual. First it has to be an Intel platform. Does it mean this utility will not work with AMD processors or NVIDIA chipsets? So, Gigabyte Xpress Recovery2 seems to have only two advantages left: it comes free with Gigabyte mainboards and you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.

So, we decided not to proceed with the description of evident functionality of all remaining programs and utilities and focus on a few brand name technologies of Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 mainboard that we haven’t yet discussed and that are pretty interesting.