As for the voltages, Vmem may be raised by up to +0.6V above the nominal with 0.1V increment, the voltage on the PCI-E bus can be increased by 0.1V. FSB OverVoltage Control and (G)MCH OverVoltage Control allow raising the corresponding voltages by 0.3V with 0.1V increment. I didn’t notice any improvement of the overclocking potential in case the first parameter was adjusted, while the second parameter is definitely very important: it allows increasing the voltage on the chipset North Bridge.

However, I was mostly impressed with the mainboard’s abilities in terms of processor Vcore adjustment. CPU Voltage Control parameter allows changing the processor core voltage from 0.5125V up to 1.6V with 0.0125V increment, and after that you can set it to 1.8V or even 2.0V! Wow, that might be a little bit too much?It is very convenient that the information line is always reporting the nominal processor Vcore, so that extreme overclockers didn’t get carried too far away.

We have listed almost everything. Except for the memory timings adjustment. In fact, this parameter is also available on the same page, however, you cannot see it by default. If you want to get access to all parameters of the Gigabyte mainboard, you should press Ctrl+F1 when entering the BIOS. In this case MB Intelligent Tweaker page also shows you memory timings adjustment options.

We didn’t detect any performance increase resulting from adjusting the Memory Performance Enhance parameter that is set to Normal by default, but can be reset to Fast or Turbo. As for Robust Graphics Booster parameter, that is responsible for automatic graphics card overclocking and can be set to Auto, fast and Turbo, we didn’t check its efficiency today. Graphics card overclocking with this tool as well as automatic CPU overclocking with C.I.A.2 utility do not offer that much of a range, so we decided to leave them out this time.

All other pages of the F2 BIOS version of Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 mainboard look pretty traditional. And all we can do here is just complain to Gigabyte that their PC Health Status also retained its traditional looks with no real voltage values displayed.

Here you can also set the CPU fan rotation speed with the help of FAN Speed Control Method and FAN Speed Control Mode.

I believe that you are wondering why we are discussing the older F2 BIOS version while there was the new F6 BIOS already available at that time? The problem is that I couldn’t reflash the BIOS.

This is actually very strange because Gigabyte has been using integrated Q-Flash utility for quite some time now. Everything is very simple. You activate it by pressing F8, and then you can either keep the current BIOS version or update it. As for the evident drawbacks, I believe they should move from FDD only to USB-Flash support already.

However, this time I couldn’t even save the current BIOS version, I couldn’t type in any symbols for the file name, although the keyboard was working just fine in both: the BIOS and the Q-Flash utility.

I decided to give up the idea of storing the old BIOS version and reflash the new one right away, but I faced another problem. Having read the file, the system threw me back into the main window of the Q-Flash utility. Restarting the system didn’t help. So, I decided not to take any more risks and to deal with the F2 BIOS version. And it was a smart decision as I found out later on.