UEFI and Software

Once I had our testbench up and running I jumped into the UEFI of the X99 SOC Champion to see what Gigabyte has been up to on the BIOS side of things. When I got into the UEFI right after the CMOS was cleared I was surprised to see that they have a quick and easy startup page that lets you first select the language that you prefer and then from there you get a page with quick access to the basic things needed to get everything setup. That includes the system time, boot and SATA options, as well as security and start up options.

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Once you get through the startup guide you can get into the classic UEFI mode if you would like. Here we have a much more normal layout. Being the Overclocking board the landing page takes us right to CPU frequency, memory settings, and voltage settings pages. There isn’t anything to surprising here, you can use your mouse to browse or go old school with your keyboard. When you mouse over or navigate to an option the area over on the right side does show a description of what the option does to hopefully help and prevent any damage.

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From there we can get into the BIOS features tab up top but frankly this would be better labeled as the boot options page. Here we can select the boot priority, turn on and off boot features and set the hard drive priority.

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The peripherals tab lets us set the audio LED lighting, select what PCIe slot should have display output priority, and get into things like the Ethernet connection settings.

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The chipset tab digs a little deeper with options for the sSATA and SATA configurations as well as audio controller and LAN features, basically most of what is built into the chipset.

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The last tab before getting to the save and exit option is the Power Management tab. Here we can set how we would like the computer to handle power loss and things like powering on from mouse movement or over the NIC. Standard stuff really.

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Next I booted back into windows and installed a few of the different software utilities that Gigabyte has on their website. Specifically I installed the APP Center, Ambient LED controls, and Easy Tune. They did have a few cloud options but I was just trying to dig into the meat of everything, the stuff that most people are looking for. I was a little surprised actually to find out that once you install everything that the APP Center actually brings everything together into one program. This is something that Asus has been doing for years and MSI has recently jumped on board as well. I think the only way they could improve on this would be to just give a single download option and bundle everything together. I know I would prefer to not have a few of the things installed, but if those things are just options in one single program that I install its not a big deal.

software 1

The first app I took a look at was the lighting control. For starters I was very happy to see that the software uses the same orange theme as the motherboard. Beyond that the APP Center and the programs all have a nice windows 8 theme that is clean, simple, and to the point. It looked good when running it on Windows 7 but I bet it would feel even more at home on any of my Windows 8 PCs. The lighting controls were simple, you can turn them off, set them on all of the time, have them pulse, or light up to the beat of any music playing through the sound card. There is also an option to turn the rear panel LED on or off. I’m not sure if this is a carryover from the SOC Force, but I didn’t see a rear panel LED at all.

software 2

The other app that I installed was the EasyTune program. Now I remember a LONG time ago just how weird this program was so just opening it all up now is so refreshing. Just like I mentioned before, the software looks great and matches the SOC Orange theme. Most importantly they keep things simple. When you open up the program you can select from a few default overclocks or the option to do an auto tune. I will get into that more later in the overclocking section, but I love that the software gets right to the point, keeping things simple for people who don’t know how to overclock. Digging into the program more you can find tabs along the side to change basically every single overclocking related option in the UEFI and here you can slide a bar and see the results right after clicking apply. The same goes for memory options as well as all of the voltage and power options. In fact I see things in here that I don’t remember seeing in the UEFI, especially when it comes to controlling the Phase settings.

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Beyond being easy to use and looking good. The App center also checks for updates and lets you know when there is an update available. Equally important is the option up top to see what you don’t have installed. Here you can one click install any of the Gigabyte options that you didn’t install at the start or perhaps that they didn’t have out yet at the time. Once you click an update it will give you a status page that shows you what it is doing and how far along it is as well as the status bar down at the bottom that shows you how far you are into it all overall.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36624 22 Apr 2015 18:36
Today I check out a motherboard that is sporting a sharp LanOC Orange color scheme. Check out how it performs inside!
summer01 replied the topic: #36656 16 May 2015 08:42
The world’s number one overclocker, British-born 8Pack selected the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion is still well equipped due to the nature of the X99 platform?

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