Gadgetory

would you like to flash your bios fast or intact it's no mystery at this point that Intel's coming out with the 9900 K and other CPUs and so is e39 motherboards are coming with that we have the gigabyte Ethernet 19 master in front of us we have the azrog z3 90 Taichi ultimate we've got the msi completely changed brand in here meg z3 90 god-like talked about that more later and the gigabyte ones one we're gonna look at today so this isn't a review it's not a PCB analysis we're getting to that though build Zoid has all the data he needs what we're looking at right now is the BIOS the reason we're looking at this is because gigabyte has routinely had one of the worst BIOS and just anything integrations that we've had to work with over the past few years and asus is clearly a market leader in their BIOS capabilities like what you can achieve with it in overclocking msi has gotten way better for usability gigabytes kind of in stock but they've completely rebuilt it for this series and so that's what we're gonna look at and see is it actually better because I know a lot of you have had the same question before that this video is brought to you by Thermal Grizzlies high-end thermal paste and liquid metal thermal Grizzlies cryo not is an affordable high quality thermal compound that doesn't face some of the aging limitations of other pastes on the market cryo not has a thermal conductivity of 12.5 watts per meter Kelvin focuses on endurance is easy to spread and isn't electrically conductive making it safe to use on GPU dies thermal grizzly also makes conductor not liquid metal which we've used to drop 20 degrees off some temperatures than our dee-lighted tests by a tube at the link in the description below first of all for this board we'll talk a little bit about the hardware but not much there's an actual finned heat sink on there so I'm really happy about that I haven't tested it yet don't know if it's any good we'll test vrm thermals soon enough but gigabyte did this 4x4 70 as well and they were like the only motherboard manufacturer to get the memo and start doing finned heat sinks again so really cool to see that in the very least they still have the covers on top of it so marketing still gets what they want which is for the heatsink to be completely obstructed by things but it looks like engineering and tactical marketing have successfully managed to get finns under the obstructions so there's still more service area even though there's not a lot of airflow from the top but that's okay because we can still get some air in through the inner rim of it and through the outside so significantly better than previously and marketing still gets what they want but we're here to talk more about BIOS today so let's take a look at that so this is the new BIOS I am going to be learning this with you today and criticizing it and complimenting it live as I see it for the first time as well so you can learn it with me this is I guess considered easy mode or as hard mode this is easy mode we have classic mode f2 what's that okay it looks like the old one so here's the old BIOS basically in a wrapper it's got a bit of a UI change around the outer edges but where where's hardwood where's that Vance mode normally there's an advanced mode with the easy mode but I guess it's just classic we'll look through it more but I think it's just class mode so this is the only one we actually care about let's look at this so for some of the complaints I had I've always disliked the smart fan settings option in gigabytes bios that's disappointing that's the same so this is the reason I didn't like this is because it's separate pop-up and none of the hotkeys work on this screen specifically so smart fan I would like to be able to get into BIOS set my fan speeds to like fall for example and I do like this feature a lot apply to all I really like that so they've they've always had that though and then I want to be able to hit f10 and save and exit but none of the hotkeys work here so gigabyte does this a lot where they have all these weird popups within it's like windows within windows within Windows as unnecessary levels of complexity but so I guess this is the new Advanced Mode let's get into the advanced frequency settings this is where most of the action happens for overclocking on gigabytes boards base clock is standard typically 100 and it looks like if you hit Enter on this it pops up just a list of every number in the world between 80 and whatever the max is whatever their max is so kind of interesting choice there of course you should just type in the number you want but be CLK slice ratios for graphics known really uses these but it's nice to have the option I suppose CBO upgrade should probably be a lookup table pree overclocks that they've set and what I would like to see is if I open this and I select one I want to see reflected in BIOS what it's changing so I want to see that number turn into 48 right now if it's if what 4.8 does is change the clock ratio to 448 then I want to see that number reflected when I enter the pre overclocked setting and likewise I would like to see in the voltage tab I would like to see what they're trying to set for that so we still have like current setting over here I want to know what's there for the the new option we just chose so that's something I'd like to see changed for this BIOS I guess it's not off to the best start we already know the fan settings haven't really changed how they work so that's not different the advanced core options probably where we look next I would love to have so here's what I'd like gigabyte if you're if you're watching this here's what I would like to see what gigabyte really needs to get away from is having 10,000 menus within menus and having like pop-ups of numbers between 80 and 500 with a significant figure accuracy of 2 decimal points like it's just not it's this is just unnecessarily difficult to navigate even though it's but apparently been upgraded I'm still see a lot of the problems I've had so like this page this page should have if you're looking at CPU overclocking core clocks things like that just just multipliers to what I'm looking for you're looking at just multipliers I shouldn't have to go into a submenu called advanced CPU core settings and then navigate to the cores here under the Intel Turbo Boost Technology section which is kind of confusing I think for most likely anyone who's not worked with a gigabyte board before is used to other boards what I want to see is per CPU clock ratio it should just have sub options under it where you can set 48 X 4 cores 1 & 2 & 47 X 4 cores 3 through whatever so that's that's problem I have with gigabyte BIOS too many menus within menus it looks like that hasn't changed yet but we'll keep looking through it and see what they've improved so yeah I'd really I'd love to see the CPU overclocking page simplified and I don't know I like it's hard to say it's I think it's hard to make a lot of changes that would really make a lot of sense without looking like they're copying Asus because Asus just does it so well but I'm positive that there is a better way to do it that is not a copy of a C's without having menus within menus because this is just unnavigable or four I think you know UI design 101 as few clicks as possible as the rule so anyway turbo ratios you want to adjust them individually they're all in here it is kind of nice though I will say that gigabyte shows you the stock just in there this is there the previous or current settings listing over here so I like that we can see the stock turbo ratios that Intel provisions for the per core sets and then for the power package power limits this is another thing that I think could be improved so if I type a huge number in the power line because I want to remove the power limitations on gigabytes board for overclocking it up 99.9999 and it goes to auto what I wanted to want to see it go to is the biggest number there is which in this case is 40 90 but you can find out by hitting Enter which then goes through evidently about 4,000 numbers one by one which also seems kind of weird but it's a quick way to find out what the maxes I guess so I'll take that where I can get it another thing I'd like to see is a where's LLC do they have ILC in here this time so this is good core current limits good that's not changed though they've had that for a while now number of cores enabled is good this is something so here's the thing all of this stuff these are power settings and they are power settings that relate to the CPU for the most part but there's like DRAM power settings in here too there's sea state settings there's speed shift mixed with hyper-threading mixed with number of cores enabled makes with per core overclocking half of that stuff should be in a different tab like all of the power settings in here so we've got let's see pac is power limit cpu current limit see States all of that stuff package see state limit all of those power settings energy-efficient turbo what is that that's as well probably should move but all of these settings I think like the power setting should be moved into I don't know how about like voltage and power settings or something something that makes more sense I look at this like so it's top menu you have this menu here MIT I don't know what that stands for I never have but you have MIT which is all I know is this is the overclocking tab that's the only place I care about so we have that menu then you have all these other ones pretty standard stuff and then the MIT menu has within it menus and it has no top-level options like when I as few clicks as possible guys so that when I load this page I should see clock I should see ratios I should see base clock I should see beak or all of them the critical stuff the overclocking should be here if you want to bury more advanced settings like current limitations power limitations things like that put them in an advanced power and voltage tab like this but then this goes to more sub menus and that's so ok let's go here so it's gonna take me several clicks and it's not like the huge amount of time and I don't want to exaggerate it but it'll take me several clicks to find what I want and while that is not a big deal you know maybe I'm spending 10 minutes looking for all the settings I want instead of three at the end then after that you learn where they are the end of the day you're gonna overlook things and forget about stuff because it's not all in front of you so I'd really like to see the most important stuff for just a basic overclock I'm not even talking advanced stuff here so I'm not talking about like what we were doing for the RIP J rappel TT stream I'll talk about what builds ordinaire Bower dude I'm talking about I want the ratios on a per core level or sync all cores whatever you want to call it if you don't use a C's terminology talking to gigabyte that should be in the top page for whatever MIT is and I'd like to see V core there I'd like to see probably definitely per core overclocking v core base clock and probably XMP toggles should be in there so memory based memory settings should be Auto should be XMP and after that you have a timings page and you let people who want to play with hymens do that because that's a special group of people who want to do that that should be buried I agree but to not have at least just like XMP on or often here seems like a wasted amount of clicks because if there's one thing that I think a lot of new builders will overlook and gigabyte is clearly trying to appeal the new builders to some extent because they've revised the easy mode bios there's one thing new builders will overlook it's that their memory isn't going to run at just the speed that it says it runs at unless they go and tell it to do that in BIOS because of how JEDEC and the board's work together so yeah XMP should be on this page Correggio is base clock and I think also I'll leave fully most up there all the power offsets should be moved to an easier to access page AVX offset should probably be on the main page as well I think that covers us for that one another thing I do like though so this is something I noticed earlier when playing around with this the BIOS now says what's changed so this saw wanted for so long from gigabyte and Asus does it a suits doesn't make the best things in the world either they certainly have flaws but if there's one thing they do actually really well it is genuinely BIOS and just from an ease of use standpoint so gigabyte is now reporting what you've changed before it reboots which is great that's what I want to see because I want to know what's changed in case there's a lot of stuff in here and it's all buried so if you're gonna bury stuff at least tell me what I changed that way if I accidentally change something I know it rather than having to dig for it later so this is good I like this the job well done gigabyte for adding some stuff like that so they've started a few things here I'm just noticing and let's let's go back to easy mode and see if there's any correlation there favorites f11 okay so here's favorites and this is something we've seen on boards in the past it's not well I'm not sure actually if gigabyte told BIOS has this or not but it's good that they pre start a bunch of the stuff I'm asking for so now we're getting closer to what I want here so this this shouldn't like it's cool that it's in favourites that's cool that's useful it's great for usability and human factors but this stuff should also most of it anyway not all of it like really we don't need vtd ERP secure boot mode we don't need these things in favorites but it'd be nice to have some of these options like ratio and V core and memory multiplier maybe or just XMP and MIT natively without having to go to favorites so that's something that it seems like they kind of have the right idea but the wrong implementation and I go back to Advanced Mode that's only really only thing I care about right now so I already complain about this many as in menus and once we get into the menus we can see there is load line calibration this isn't new gigabytes kind of had this the pop ups nice this time I guess I don't really like pop ups typically but when you're gonna use words to define your levels of things like how am I supposed to know to type in an ultra extreme I don't I wouldn't talk with that so having the pop-up is good what if I type in a number that is it okay numbers correlate it that's good too so that's good to see good human factors there zero does that go to auto zero should get auto but it goes to standards I guess we'll take that don't wait doesn't make sense zero goes to standard what the hell what's normal why is it normal and standard normal standard hello okay so what I'm looking at right now is the bottom left what's changing when I do this and we can see that they're mostly changing except normal and standard appear to be the same thing at least visually maybe they're not I even I I never use these I only use extreme or high so I don't know you need to pass some - to adjust that's good well use - to just use plus they're just on my pad okay good enough anything else here we care about current protection this is something that is a bit nebulous for me so here's this is a complaint I've had for gigabyte for a while now I don't know what these mean I mean obviously I do now but when you look at it the first time you have b-corps over current protection all I know is I want it off I don't care if it's on normal or high or extreme I want it gone and so the core current protection does extreme mean it is extremely protected or does it mean it's extremely unprotected like it allows it to go extremely high or it's extremely protect that's unclear so I'd like to see the language improved on that you should probably just use honestly like off and and on and sort of on or something or if you're gonna do like current I mean this is just a number just current actual current number anything CPU v core PWM switch rate okay that's fine that's fine that's fine so let's look at this tab this is a very important tab like I said there's a lot of stuff that should be moved into here they should call voltage and power or something like that but CB v core they've got starred looks like well look at the stock voltage for the actual nuke CPUs later once they're out but they have a enter list again I don't find these particularly useful I also find the words normal and Auto to be very confusing I don't know what that means I don't like I could find out but to me normal and Auto mean the same thing and that's that the user hasn't controlled it so bit nebulous on the language I don't find these lists particularly useful but I guess if you're gonna do something on an interaction it's not the worst thing to do and maybe from a human factors usability standpoint for a new user they might look at this and maybe come to the realization that they should only really be increasing voltage about these steps rather than typing in much larger numbers without knowing that what they're doing is something so maybe that has me it's there let's read some of the text here adjust the CB v core voltage Auto equals BIOS automatically configures the setting D core voltages that can be entered manually note extreme overclock configurations may need a higher v core voltage which may incur a higher temperature so I mean that's good that's good that they warned you about temperature from a new user standpoint but they define Auto what is normal anyway be CLK adaptive voltage okay and able or disable that or go into Auto what is Auto to tell us enable/disable be CLK adaptive voltage this feature is enabled and when BCL KOC there's no need to override voltages in order to boot at a higher B CLK so okay so it tells you a bit will get the correct voltages automatically this is something that gigabytes been guilty up for a long time though they always have auto and able disabled for stuff like MC E or for like this and just just just unable to disable if the if the functionality is switching then Auto is okay if the functionality is non switching and it's always going to be enabled or disabled permanently until you boot into BIOS then only have these two options it should more or less be boolean at this point so that's just a small gripe CPVC ci ok all this is fine si IO voltages that's good to have exposure to in the same spot as V core so I appreciate that and not much else is different their chipset voltage control this is weird too so this this this gigabyte that's what I'm talking about our menu is MIT advanced voltage settings chipset voltage control and there's one option why what's what is the point of this just just put it somewhere else literally anywhere else is fine no one changes that anyway and if they do it can go somewhere else DRAM voltage control okay DRAM voltage ok 1.2 channel a B ok this seems fine they could add a few things here but will that builds oi talk about that later internal VR control ok so this is for the fiver I guess maybe for the voltage regulator I'm guessing not virtual reality yes is for the looks like it's for the vr m the fiber so we have the graphics fiber and we have current limits that's good that's good to see I mean this isn't really something that I typically use but did they have the current limits broken out individually let's do this it's been Tommy push Alton to the left for a while now or all two moves it to the left ok so just all to not left this is something that I've never found particularly useful it's not new either this has been and gigabytes BIOS all that's new here is they've changed the skin so I'm not really a hundred percent clear on why this is such a big deal but the skin is different so I don't know like here's the thing you could do this and I guess it's dynamic so maybe there's something to that or you could put all this stuff on this page which currently has nothing on it except for menus so if you're having if you have a menu which is then full of menus you have to start doing screwy stuff like putting in more menus off to the side that are accessed by an Alt key so I find this to be useful information that is in the wrong spot and I think that should move system ok there's all standard we don't need to worry about that and this is BIOS version f5 i if you didn't see that so next one BIOS what we have here security options ok that's fine quick boot options boot options this is all standard stuff no complaints here that tab makes sense peripherals looks pretty normal as well I don't see PCIe options in here ie switching to Gen 2 instead of Gen 3 to artificially limit the lanes that would be kind of nice maybe it's in the chipset options nope these kind of belong together I think peripherals and chipset I feel like you could limit some of the sub menus here and power which for again we have like actual power options that are more at a motherboard level a system boot level and then we have the power options and voltage options that are at the CPU overclocking level so maybe some some clarification of language would be good for that a CPI or something I think that covers all that stuff so that's that's most of that PC health status this is like more stuff that could just kind of be at a top-level menu somewhere I like if you're not going to put overclocking options here you just you just gonna put menus at least have like the health status or the alt menu just all listed here natively because that that would at least get use of the menu miscellaneous max link speed auto ok that's actually what I was asking for a minute ago so they do have that that's good and I don't think that's neither three mark enhancements not new you there favorites okay smart fan we saw that it's the same it's fine let's switch back to easy mode so here's where you get all the readouts that are in odd places within the actual BIOS this is the much less useful BIOS maybe I don't know very new builders might like it it looks pretty from a marketing standpoint but we've never liked these every company makes one to some extent it's just they're not they're not particularly useful at least we have that's kind of weird you hit enter and it just changes the profile but at least you have access to that's that's weird though DRM status so my select is on DRAM status and hitting enter which is really not clear at all even though I just stumbled into it changes this thing down here which looks like a different option so excellent being able disable that should just be like accesses XMP or something boot sequence that's good to have smart fan again it's pop-up but at least this I like I like that they have this successful in the easy menu because that's probably the one thing that everyone wants to change is the fan speed the dr at the dram excuse me speeds and stuff like that and i think for the rest of the easy mode i don't know I don't have any serious complaints I find it not particularly useful for myself but I could see it being used 12 for beginners and that's fine that's what they're going for so that's gigabytes new BIOS it's it's the old BIOS with more orange and less red and it's got the easy mode now so I don't know I've it's there are a lot of things that could be improved in gigabytes bios it's not terrible like here's the thing gigabyte baked some really good boards these days at the high end especially so they have hardware that's perfectly fine some of the gaming seven gave me nine series which I think that Brandon's going away now unfortunately I really liked it but it's going way after everyone else did the same thing don't know who copied her but MSI also had gaming three five seven whatever and I guess in they'll kind of started anyway so Brandon changed but previous gaming seven and nine motherboards have been pretty good on the hardware level BIOS is always been weak for gigabyte it's usable you can get what you want it's just not the most advanced and powerful BIOS in the world it's kind of difficult to navigate and it's it's slow to work with just from a human use case scenario not in terms of loading or things like that I actually didn't try moving the mouse they fixed the mouse I don't know if there's been any changes to the mouse behavior but it seems okay we've had previous gigabyte bios's where the mouse would move on an XY grid and that was infuriating even though you really shouldn't be using a mouse in BIOS anyway but if you're gonna have it at least work it looks fine here so no complaints about the mouse movement this time but yeah a lot can be improved nothing's really changed in a significant way for the advanced mode bios which for whatever reason it's called the classic mode that's also confusing so I get to this page I see ez mode I'm like okay I don't want that where's that vance mode well I guess my only other option is classic I don't want that either because I know what that is and I didn't like it I don't know there's a lot that could be clarified here and gigabyte has a lot of work cut out for them the board I want to be clear we haven't but we haven't reviewed the board we have benchmarked it it could be perfectly good on a hardware level this is you can survive this you can work with this it's not a big deal if the BIOS is annoying to work with as long as it has the features it needs and from other people does so they're fine there and as long as the vrm is good we're gonna look at that but it seems fine and it's got a real heatsink on the beer I'm sorry I really like that could job gigabyte on on pushing for real heat sinks on motherboards again seriously if you if you have a chance to praise gigabyte for anything they've done it's that heatsink cuz I'd like to see other companies follow suit and giving them credit work to do there is is definitely they deserve that so job well done a lot of stuff the PCH heatsink cover thin it's kind of interesting with the way the LEDs are laid out not really a thing I talk about much but I do like their implementation so like a hardware level it seems like this is an okay product and we'll review it later it's just that I want to be clear on the BIOS level there's a lot that can be improved and this is gigabytes biggest weakness as their BIOS wear ASIS it's their biggest strength because price kind of starts gaining issues a bit at the high end that's it for this one though thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow and razaaq's upside directly and we'll have more of these z3 90 videos on the channel soon with the new intel TV launches as well and store documents X's down a typical shirt like this one the graph logo shirt is what I have on or one of our mod bats I'll see you all next time