Installation
We placed our new Intel Core i5-7600K (Kaby Lake) processor on to the motherboard, and then mounted the Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 240 AIO cooler on top. The whole motherboard was then carefully placed on the Lian-Li Pitstop T60 test bench chassis, powered by Thermaltake Toughpower 750W PSU.
Everything fitted perfectly. However, I found the SATA ports 0 and 1 were completely covered over by the Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card.
The BIOS
Gigabyte’s BIOS on this motherboard isn’t the best I’ve come across. It might take some getting use to. However, it’s fully loaded for overclocking and performance tweaks.
The motherboard also comes with Gigabyte’s DualBIOS …
“GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards feature GIGABYTE DualBIOS™, an exclusive technology from GIGABYTE that protects arguably one of your PC’s most crucial components, the BIOS. GIGABYTE DualBIOS™ means that your motherboard has both a ‘Main BIOS’ and a ‘Backup BIOS’, protecting users from BIOS failure due to virus, hardware malfunction, improper OC settings or power failure during the update process.”
Simple Options
If you want mild and easy overclocking, the Gigabyte BIOS allows you to do this by using their EZ OC option. It will automatically choose the best settings for maximum performance. It’s basically “Turbo Boost” … and for the Core i5-7600K … it will easily reach 4.2GHz.
Advanced Options
For overclockers and extreme enthusiasts who want to squeeze every ounce of power from the CPU and memory. Warning – Recommended only for use by experts.
So I decided to ditch the EZ OC options. Instead, I used the advanced options and was able to overclocked the Core i5-7600K to whopping 4.9GHz with rock solid stability at a really high voltage of 1.5v!
RGB Fusion!
The RGB Fusion setup page allows me to change the color of the LED lighting to what ever I want … upto 16.8 million colors! There’s also the options for Pulse Mode, Cycle Color, Static or Flush Mode.
