Work Specifics

In fact, we have already discussed all meaningful peculiarities of Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P BIOS. However, we need to dwell on two more things that we haven’t yet touched upon or that we didn’t discuss enough.

In particular, Gigabyte mainboards based on Intel P45 Express chipset revealed a new function that we hadn’t seen before by Gigabyte or on any other mainboards. I assume that this function may have appeared way earlier, but I only noticed it for the first time during Gigabyte GA-EP45T-Extreme mainboard tests. If you clear the CMOS but don’t access the BIOS right away to configure the parameters, you will get a window with the saved settings profiles. By default the mainboard would offer you to load the last known successful configuration profile, but you might as well choose any other profile or access the BIOS to set everything manually.

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P mainboard also has a similar feature; however, when we tried to use it, we revealed certain issues. For example, you can only load the first profile (when the system is not overclocked) out of three saved profiles you see on the previous screenshot. Formally, nothing should prevent you from trying to load any of the overclocking profiles, but the board will still boot with default settings. If you access the BIOS and check the “MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” section, you will see that the settings of the chosen profile have been loaded and put in place, but you will see no warning message about a failed start.

It looks like the problem is connected with the fact that contemporary Intel chipsets require the so-called “double reboot” when it comes to serious changes of the configuration parameters including the changes made during processor overclocking. The mainboard shuts down and then reboots applying the selected settings. This is what happens when we select the overclocking profile in the BIOS. If we select it from the menu that pops up after CMOS has been cleared, then the mainboard reboots as usual and no wonder that system parameters do not change. As we know from the DFI LanParty JR X58-T3H6 Review, currently only DFI engineers managed to somehow overcome this problem with “double reboot”.

Actually, I think it is not a very serious problem. We don’t clear CMOS that often enough to be concerned about this issue. But since Gigabyte mainboards have this unique function that does in fact speed up and simplify the loading of the desired profile saving you time and trouble entering the BIOS, then it would be better if it worked correctly also for the overclocking settings profiles.

The next thing that I would like to dwell on here hasn’t yet been discussed in our previous Gigabyte mainboard reviews. And the reason for that is not because the issue has been eliminated or is no longer acute, but because we are very tired of repeating the same thing over and over again. Today we have already brought up the Ctril-F1 key combination that goes back to the days when Gigabyte mainboards were not very overclocking-friendly. We used to be upset about the whole bunch of different issues that have been eliminated almost completely by now. There is only one of them left: in case of over-overclocking all parameters get reset back to defaults without warning.