GIGABYTE Z97X-GAMING 5 Review

[section_title title=”Bios”]BIOS

It should come as no surprise that Gigabyte have decide to go with their DualBIOS on the Gaming 5. On one side we have the normal BIOS that resembles what we have been seeing for years. This is of course handy if you are not to familiar with what to look for, or if you just want to make a couple quick changes to some settings.

When we first boot into BIOS we are greeted with a welcome screen that allows us to chose our corresponding language. After selecting our language we are then presented with a 2nd screen which allows to choose our BIOS vesion. Left bar for UEFI or right bar for normal.  Gigabyte has also given us some easy access options via the “F” keys on our keyboard as well as some on screen options.

Starting with the old and more familiar BIOS, you can see the traditional BIOS still offers every option you would need to overclock and change any settings you may like. Through the M.I.T tab we have all the options we would need to help us get a nice overclock from all of our hardware. You can adjust the frequency, memory and voltage settings as well as check you PC Health Status.

The rest of the tabs across the top allow us to check our System Information, access our BIOS features, set up our peripherals and even change some of our Power Management settings.

Now for the fun part! We have a look at Gigabyte’s take on the UEFI BIOS. I for one am quite a fan of the look / feel and the extra added options and information are perfect for overclocking.

We are immediately greeted with our CPU frequency for easy overclocking. If we look around the edges of the screen we will also notice all the relevant information to help us with our overclock including, voltages, temperature, fan speed and information for our CPU and BIOS version.

Aside from our frequency tab we can also have tabs to access memory, voltage and miscellaneous options.

One of my favourite features, which I unfortunately did not get a chance to really set up, was the home tab. Here you can set the options you want to see and use to further help you manage all your settings and just generally make your life a bit easier. You can set multiple profiles and shortcuts as well which streamlines the experience.