Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 (LGA 1151) Motherboard Review

BIOS and Overclocking

Most motherboard manufacturers nowadays offer multiple BIOS styles for users to enter and tweak the system settings. The latest implementation of the BIOS type is the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS, which is a simpler version to view and interact with. Each manufacturer has a different style and each motherboard could have a different colour style.

Much like other manufacturers, Gigabyte offers a simplified version of the UEFI. This ‘EZBIOS’ is a much more attractive version of the typical BIOS which is designed to be easier to use for new and seasoned users alike.

The main page gives you an overview of what you can do within this BIOS design. It’s not as comprehensive as the traditional BIOS, but you don’t need ever feature every time you enter the BIOS. All of the features here are self-explanatory such as changing the system time and boot sequence.

Moving onto the more traditional style BIOS. The first page you are presented with is the MIT page. This hosts everything you will want to increase the performance of your computer including CPU and memory frequency.

System information is a simple motherboard information screen, displaying motherboard model and BIOS versions.

The BIOS features page has all of information regarding the BIOS and operating systems. This screen allows you to fine tune your system before the BIOS loads to give the best possible experience.

Peripherals is the page where you will go to look at and tweak the information regarding anything you have plugged in into the USB, SATA or PCI ports.

The Chipset screen is likely to be one of the lesser used screens thanks to how well the chipset is already set up. However, you can tweak certain features such as the Audio.

Power Management could be misinterpreted. It doesn’t include the voltages to the components, rather the overall power features of the motherboard such as power on features and resume by alarms.

The Save and Exit screen it probably the only screen that is familiar between all motherboards. Here you can choose to save or discard your settings and manually boot into another drive if you are performing a task such as a new operating system install.

Overclocking 

Gigabyte motherboards are extremely stable and normally very simple to overclock on, however, I found this motherboard slightly more confusing than I think I should have. The MIT section of the BIOS held all of the information in the places where you would expect, but splitting up each section such as CPU frequencies and voltages into different sub-sections just makes it more confusing than it should be; although splitting everything up like that can really be helpful for new users who do not want to risk accidentally increasing voltages when increasing the frequencies.

The overclock on this was relatively easy to achieve and it held stable at 4.8GHz at a fixed voltage of 1.45v. The voltage reading through CPU-z is incorrect which could be a compatibility issue with this motherboard and CPU-z. Just remember how new the series is, updates will be coming thick and fast to increase functionality and compatibility.