Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC Motherboard Review (w/ Intel i7 4770k)

Gigabyte have completely revamped their UEFI bios for their latest products and it is extremely impressive. There is an immense amount of information on the home screen including details on the processor along the left, with fan speeds and voltages. Underneath this is the memory status – defaulted in this case to 1333mhz. The system status is available from the panel down the right hand side of the screen. The drive boot sequence is seen in the middle panel, bottom right.

Gigabyte let the user adjust the layout and readout of the BIOS screens to suit their own tastes. This is very indepth and is a very commendable idea sure to appeal to an audience who feel that the default settings are never completely right for them.

The panel information will only update after you press the mouse button or hit the return key. The System panel gives a quick overview of passwords, startup pages and display policies.

The BIOS Features panel gives an overview of many of the BIOS settings, such as showing the detailed system information, or a Gigabyte boot screen. There are Fast boot options here, alongside virtualisation settings.

The peripherals panel gives an overview of various device configuration settings and SATA configurations.

The Power Management panel lets the user configure wake up times and days as well as power on by keyboard and mouse settings.


The main performance panel has various little subsections in the panel underneath, which is actually easily missed if you aren't paying attention. In here we can adjust the frequency of the processor, memory and adjust voltage settings, while checking the health status of each.

The first course of action is to correct the memory speeds by selecting the XMP profile. This is handled in the memory subsection of the main ‘memory' panel, as shown above. The motherboard correctly set the voltage without intervention.

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