Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
revision 2.0

     Once the motherboard is in the enclosure and all the wires and cables were hooked up, a quick slap of the power button and..........beep! This is the welcome screen that will greet you after a successful POST.

     First stop on any new setup would the BIOS. While the basic menu structure of the Award BIOS is pretty much the same from motherboard to motherboard, each motherboard manufacturer adds their own bits an pieces. Such as the Dual BIOS/Q-flash utility that is attached to the F8 key. For initial setup, our premier concern is under the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) as this is where all the overclocking occurs. Something else particular to Gigabyte is the need to hit the CTRL+F1 key combo to unlock all of the options under all of the menus. For those folks who jump right into the BIOS without reading the users manual, yes - this is a documented feature. Until the CRTL+F1 combo is hit at the main menu, a lot of the more critical options will be hidden such as those that effect voltage.

     With the CTRL+F1 key-combo the M.I.T. menu grows to two pages in length - notice the scroll bar on the right side between the menu options and the Item Help dialogs. The top half holds mostly CPU clock speeds, memory multipliers and with the latest BIOS a HIGH SPEED DRAM DLL setting with two options. With two settings (Option 1 and Option 2) Gigabyte claims this will help increase system stability with a DRAM setting over 1000MHz. That will make a fine point for testing later on. The Robust Graphics Booster is Gigabyte's rendition of accelerating the traffic on the PCI Express bus to the graphics card. CPU Intelligent Accelerator or C.I.A.2, is another proprietary option that overclocks the CPU in percentage increments.  Of course, the preferred method here is to use Enable the CPU Host Clock Control option and just enter the FSB you want to use. The board will accept anything between 100 -700Mhz. But then again, it's more dependant on what your individual components will accept

     A feature I really like here  --  the default value for the DRAM timing is displayed in white next to each setting's menu option. The value is read straight from the DRAM module. This takes the guess work out of recover later.

     Memory multipliers can make the overclocking world go 'round, and obviously the more - the better. The baseline is of course, AUTO which is obviously not the place to start for a successful overclock. With the setting at 2.0, the memory bus is actually in a 1:1 ratio with the CPU FSB. So basically you take your CPU FSB and multiply it by the setting you select here, and that becomes your DRAM DDR bus speed. To make the process calculator free, Gigabyte has an info block right under this menu option that will display what the memory bus speed will be.

     The bottom of the menu holds holds the voltages that will be critical in your overclocking endeavors, once you move System Voltage Control from AUTO to MANUAL. Voltages get color coded based on Gigabyte's interpretation of dangerous voltages. Yellow is Normal, higher voltages turn Pink and the very high voltages are displayed with flashing red text.