Now it is time for us to dwell on excellent (no exaggeration here) features of the overclocker section called MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T). It allows changing frequencies, dividers, multipliers, timings and voltages. This section is very easy to work with, very illustrative. It is so thoroughly designed that unlike other BIOS sections, there is hardly anything to improve here. Just look at the list of available parameters, their names, their convenient grouping and the use of highlighting to indicate higher settings, and you will see what I mean:

Only slightly cut-down features compared with flagship Gigabyte products may disappoint you a tiny bit. For example, there is no way to change Command Rate 1T/2T among the available timings:

Parameter	Supported range
CAS Latency Time	3 – 6
DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay	1 – 15
DRAM RAS# Precharge	1 – 15
Precharge Delay (tRAS)	1 – 63
ACT to ACT Delay (tRRD)	1 – 15
Rank Write to Read Delay	1 – 31
Write to Precharge Delay	1 – 31
Refresh to ACT Delay	0 – 255
Read to Precharge Delay	1 – 15
Static tRead Value	1 – 31
Static tRead Phase Adjust	1 – 31

Also, the mainboard installed the strange timings like on the photo above by default: 5-7-7-14. Sometimes it would read the SPD correctly and claim that it would set the timings to 5-5-5-18, but after Windows booted the timings turned out still to be set at 5-7-7-24. However, this is not a serious issue: if you give up automatic timings setting and change them manually, the problem will go away.

However, when the CPU is running at its nominal speeds, the mainboard sets the memory frequency at 1066MHz instead of 800MHz, like many other would do. You can set the memory frequency even higher if you wish and if your memory can support higher speed, because the list of available multipliers for FSB:Mem ratio is pretty long. For our processor it included the following multipliers: 2.0, 2.4, 3.2, 3.33, 4.0, 2.5, 3.0. And you won’t need to calculate the resulting memory frequency yourself, because there is a special parameter called Memory frequency that will display the current as well as the resulting memory frequency for you.

However, the greatest thing is that the modest Static tRead Value parameter in fact offers you to set the desired Performance Level manually. Performance Enhance parameter initially set to Turbo should better be changed to Standard during overclocking that is why during our test session we could even see Performance Level of 13, which is very high. The lower the Performance Level, the higher the speed. So, it is extremely important to be able to manually adjust Performance Level to hit high speeds. As far as we know, only ASUS, DFI and Gigabyte mainboards currently offer this option.

One more drawback we could point out at this point, is smaller supported voltage intervals compared with top Gigabyte mainboards. However, a lot of mainboard maker would do the same thing, otherwise no one would buy their expensive top products any more, if everything were also available on a more mainstream solution. Nevertheless, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 offers enough voltage settings with sufficient supported ranges for successful CPU overclocking.

Parameter	Supported range
CPU Voltage Control	0.7 - 2.35 V
DDR2 OverVoltage Control	Up to +1.55 V
PCI-E OverVoltage Control	Up to +0.35 V
FSB OverVoltage Control	Up to +0.35 V
(G)MCH OverVoltage Control	Up to +0.375 V

Of course, we could ask Gigabyte to display the voltage in absolute units, like the processor Vcore, and not in relative units, like all other voltages. Voltage in volts makes much more sense. You really feel the responsibility when you set 1.5V for the chipset North Bridge instead of the default 1.25V. However, it is much easier psychologically to just add +0.25V, although it will still result into the same 1.5V.

I would also like to say that only ASUS and Gigabyte mainboard feature a BIOS reflashing tool built into the BIOS itself. You can launch Q-Flash utility on Gigabyte mainboards by pressing F8 from the main menu. It is very easy to work with thanks to intuitive graphics interface, and reflashing the BIOS directly from the BIOS Setup seems to be safer than doing it from Windows OS.

Like many other contemporary mainboards, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 can save BIOS settings in profiles and load them upon request. You can save the profiles by pressing F11 and load them by pressing F12 from the main BIOS menu. This time we cannot actually compare the implementation of this feature with the same on ASUS mainboards. Gigabyte mainboards have it implemented way better. First of all, you can save much more profiles. Second, you can provide each and every one of them with a detailed description. Third, after each successful system restart, it saves the current settings automatically and counts all successful boot-ups, so that you could return to the latest operational settings at any time.

All the criticism we shared here doesn’t all mean that Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 mainboard BIOS has issues. On the contrary, this BIOS is so good that we only want to make it even better and that’s why we shared some optimization ideas. However, we have already seen quite a few times how great theoretical features fail during immediate practical experiments. So, now it is definitely the time for us to check Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 out during actual overclocking tests.