Inside Gigabyte's 3D Dual UEFI BIOS

One of the interesting changes Gigabyte rolled out with its Intel X79-series motherboards is a novel new '3D BIOS' interface. Now this isn't a red-and-blue glasses kind of 3D experience, it's just an interactive photograph of the motherboard offering point and click BIOS management. When you mouse over different bits of the board photograph, like the CPU area, memory or expansion slots, it bring up the relevant UEFI BIOS option menu.

The '3D BIOS' user interface is intended to help novice PC users interact with complicated BIOS settings on friendlier terms. While this is a good concept, if you don't know what you're doing in the first place it's perhaps best not to be messing with intricate clock speed and voltage options... That's the crux of the problem PCSTATS has with Gigabyte's 3D BIOS; it fixes something novice users rarely use and breaks something enthusiasts often interact with.

'3D BIOS' used on the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5

Wrecking the BIOS for Enthusiasts

Most enthusiasts we've informally polled tend to prefer the quick-to-navigate text based layout of a traditional BIOS and find the excessive eye-candy in many of the new UEFI BIOS interfaces an unwelcome change. Now there's no denying that the old blue-screen BIOS had to be replaced by the UEFI BIOS for very real technical reasons, it's just that excessively showy UEFI BIOS user interfaces have made adjustments a slow and often convoluted exercise.

PCSTATS main complaint with the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 motherboard is this; each time we enter the 3D BIOS we're forced to go past a laggy 3D BIOS splash screen to get to the text-based 'MIT Overclocking Options' menu. For detailed configuration items users are supposed to click the function menu icons at the bottom of the screen or press <F1> to switch over. When you overclock via the BIOS as we do, navigating past this eye-candy every single time a CPU multiplier or BCLK setting is bumped up wastes time unnecessarily and quickly kills the fun in overclocking.

So Gigabyte, how about you add an option to disable the 3D BIOS UI completely? Feel free to chime in at PCSTATS Reader Feedback page with your take on all this.

LAN and rear-I/O menus in the '3D BIOS'

CPU and Overclocking menus in the '3D BIOS'

CPU Voltage specific menus in the '3D BIOS'

Expansion slot menus in the '3D BIOS'

BIOS specific menus in the '3D BIOS'

Advanced BIOS Options

Here are a couple more screen shots of the advanced UEFI BIOS menus that relate to overclocking, for those interested. :)

Main Overclocking and Frequency control menu for adjusting the CPU multiplier and BCLK frequency among other options are found in the Advanced Frequency Settings menu. Processor Base Clock (Gear Ratio) is a new option with LGA2011 processors which uses a multiplier to bump up the CPU BCLK without increasing the motherboard BCLK.

Advanced memory settings.

Plenty of memory timings to adjust if you want to really get down to the nitty gritty.

There are a great deal of voltage controls in the GA-X79-UD5 BIOS, for the memory, chipset, CPU and motherboard VRM. If these settings are enough to whet your whistle, there's a slew of really advanced voltage controls available via Gigabyte's new '3DPower' menu from the Windows desktop.

You've met the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 motherboard, a high memory capacity take on the Intel X79 chipset. Now let's look at how the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 motherboard handles in the benchmarks!