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Software & Firmware
On the surface, not much has changed on the Gigabyte UEFI front. The home screen greets us with an overlay of our CPU, memory, and voltage settings while the M.I.T. menu grants access to menus to change those settings. Pressing the right Alt key opens up the side panel, and the left Alt key generally provides a useful description of the currently highlighted field. Drilling into the Frequency settings, EZ Overclock Tuner provides for pre-configured clock rate settings. CPU Clock Control lets you adjust the reference clock for the system, for finer-grained overclocking control. Advanced CPU Cores settings and the Memory Frequency menu are similar to the X370 boards, and are documented in the manual. Voltage controls are similar to X370 as well, though the addition of Chipset Core 2.5 and 1.05V options are new.
Smart Fan 5 behaves similarly to previous Gigabyte products, and we prefer to run our system in “Silent” mode. We’ve also noticed that by default in our configuration the fans ramp to maximum speed during Prime95 tests, so be careful with what sensor is being monitored. RGB Fusion is also back to fulfill our lighting customization desires--and we still find the Pulse mode the most pleasant. The headpone/speaker-friendly DAC-UP feature makes its way to the yellow rear USB 3.0 ports and can be modified through the peripherals menu in the UEFI.
Scrolling down to the Peripherals tab also provides the AMD CBS tab. Traversing through the sub-menus here appeared similar to what we've seen on X370 boards. But these options might change depending on what version of Ryzen processor is plugged into the socket. As we had a fist-generation Ryzen chip for testing, we will visit this option again once a 2000 series processor is in our possession. Hopefully, the help menus toward the bottom can be more helpful than stating ‘no help string’ in the instance additional debugging is needed.
The UEFI is serviceable, and provides the function we need to get going. Having tested several versions of Gigabytes UEFI, we can say that each has been stable, and the memory issues we saw around the initial X370 launch are far behind us. With any luck, Gigabyte will tweak some of the aesthetic features to the UEFI to keep us engaged while we fiddle with voltages and frequency settings.
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