Let’s get back to the main “Mainboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” page and try adjusting the voltages manually. Just like with the timings, all “Auto” settings are gone, but this time they get replaced with “Normal”. And what are these “Normal” settings?

However, when we got down to business, there was a pleasant surprise waiting for us. When we tried to change the voltages, there appeared informational parameters reporting the current values for the settings in question. If the numbers were too high, they were highlighted with a warning color.

The total voltage sent to the CPU can also be calculated from the nominal voltage that we know. Unfortunately, we know nothing about setting of the “CPU NB VID Control” parameter. And there is no option for raising the HyperTransport bus voltage, either. It’s a pity.

Just in case, let me check out the “PC Health Status” page. However, the functionality of this section has never been among Gigabyte mainboards’ strengths. The main distinguishing feature of this section is probably the ability to control the rotation speed of three-pin processor fan, which seems to be gone by almost all contemporary mainboards except the ones from Gigabyte.

However, Gigabyte has a great utility for Windows called EasyTune6, which we have already praised quite a few times in our previous reviews. This program reports the info about the processor and system board, may read information from the memory modules SPD, may help overclock the processor, memory or even graphics card. You can use CIA2 dynamic overclocking (CPU Intelligent Accelerator), set up fan rotation speed control for the CPU cooler, check the monitoring readings. However, all these functions may be also implemented through the mainboard BIOS or with other utilities. The unique feature of EasyTune6 is its ability to report all voltage settings that the mainboard can control in the “Tuner” section on the “Advanced” page.

Everything we have just said I absolutely true, but only if you use EasyTune6 on any mainboard other than Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P. It turned out that in this case the utility reports the same two voltages (CPU and memory) that we can see in the BIOS Setup or with any other utilities, such as CPUID Hardware Monitor, for instance. Unfortunately, we had to uninstall the EasyTune6 program, which was of no particular value anymore. What a disappointment!

Gigabyte mainboards are well-known for very convenient settings saving algorithm in the BIOS. Just press F11 in the main menu in order to save one of eight possible BIOS settings profiles. Each profile can have its own name reminding you of the contents. Profiles can be saved not only in the memory but also on external media. You should absolutely take advantage of the latter feature, because you will lose all saved profiles after reflashing the BIOS or switching to a reserve chip.

By pressing F12 you get access to a similar menu where you can select one of the presaved profiles. By the way, the board saves the current settings configuration automatically after each successful POST pass. This allows you to return to the last known working configuration, even if you haven't saved it yourself.

Everything seems to be great, however, Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard prepared another unexpected surprise for us: the loaded profile usually applied only on second try. No wonder that the board wouldn’t start on the first attempt, if we were trying to make it work with the CPU overclocked way too high. But the board required a second reboot even when we loaded a profile with nominal settings. Not too convenient.

As for the built-in QFlash utility for BIOS updating that can be launched by pressing F8 from the main menu or “End” during mainboard booting, we have already mentioned all its advantages multiple times in our reviews. It is great that we can forget about boot-up floppies or flash-drives: the built-in utility will save the current BIOS version and update the BIOS with a new one from any available medium.

However, the functionality of the Gigabyte QFlash utility is pretty limited and hasn’t been refreshed for quite some time. Unlike a similar program integrated into the BIOS of Asus boards, we don’t see any information about the current BIOS version as well as about the version we are going to reflash. We don’t know which microchip we are using to save the new BIOS version in, therefore if the board decides that the primary chip is damaged, we may end up with the old BIOS version and lose all the settings we have worked on all this time. Besides, Gigabyte mainboards as always do not report anything about resetting all parameters or switching to the reserve BIOS chip, so you will not learn about it right away: the board doesn’t report the current processor frequency on system boot-up.

And you will be wrong to believe that DDR3 SDRAM from the screenshot above is working at 1066MHz, according to Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard. In fact, the current memory multiplier in the nominal CPU operational mode would have produced 1066MHz memory frequency. But in reality, the CPU is overclocked and the actual memory frequency is much higher.

For some reason Clear CMOS switch resets the date and time in the mainboard BIOS.

We seem to have found quite a few issues, don’t you think so? Luckily, most of them are not critical and will not cause any problems for Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P in nominal as well as overclocked modes. They may simply cause you some inconveniences, and that’s about it. We ran all tests with the BIOS version F2b, however, when we updated it to F3 nothing changed.