What happens when you turn your cellphone Bluetooth off? It's supposed to poll for a customizable interval and then enter the designated power state, but we have no idea what it really does as we couldn't get it to recognize a paired phone. Walk out of range and the machine goes to S3 (standby, suspend to RAM) or S4 (hibernate, suspend to disk). We uninstalled Splashtop Connect quickly.ĪutoGreen is an interesting concept, where a Bluetooth connected phone is used to indicate your physical presence to the machine. After signing in, we looked at the applications access details, and only your basic information is listed as required for the app - the rest of the settings can be removed. Once you allow this, you get a sidebar in your browser that allows you to use Facebook. By social media, it means Facebook, and by functions they mean gain access to your basic information, ability to post to your wall, access your inbox, access your news feed, access your friend requests, and access your data at any time, even when you're not using the service. SplashTop Connect is an Internet Explorer and Firefox plugin that adds social media functions to your browser. The BIOS has an EFI mode for installing a compatible OS on to a GPT partition sized greater than 2.2Tb, configurable on the Advanced page.
This takes the form of a pre-install driver, loaded at F6 storage driver install time. The 3TB+ unlock utility enables 32-bit systems without Hybrid EFI technology to access the remaining space after the 2TB limit is reached, under MBR and GPT partition styles. Q-Share is a file sharing tool for local area networks, seems to have no special function you can't do already.
Smart Recovery 2 uses Microsoft Volume Shadow Copies technology to back up or restore your personal and system data, for Windows Vista/7. Gigabyte recommend 10GB or more for back-up space. I fixed it, but has anyone else experienced this I wanted to use Easy Tune 6 to create some custom fan curves, and I needed to install the App Center to do so. Xpress Recovery 2 creates compressed backups of your system drive, and requires a dedicated partition space on a hard drive, NTFS filesystem, and no RAID arrays. Discussion Gigabyte App Center and Easy Tune 6 caused immediate BSOD on boot.
The E2 series is new, with the E2-3200 featuring a dual core with 65W TDP and Radeon 6370D, which is likely to be between 180 and 240 Radeon Cores at intermediate clock (~500MHz). The A8-3800 and A8-3600 are 65W TDP APUs with Turbo CORE, and appear to have the same Vision Engine configurations as the 38, using 6550D and 6530D respectively. Whatever your preference, the UD3 BIOS has enough features to keep you busy until the early hours and as we have seen, GIGABYTE support is excellent with many regular BIOS updates forthcoming.The A75M-UD2H's CPU support list gives us a peek at some future APUs coming, in addition to the launch A8-3850 and A8-3650. The voltage ranges are excellent allowing you to easily fry your components should you wish(!) or save a polar bear and underclock.
The BIOS is however very well laid out and once you resign yourself to using the keyboard, it is easy to navigate by having all of the settings and sub menus precisely where you would expect them to be. After a while I found myself simply using the keyboard to tab through the features as I found it to be much quicker than persevering the mouse control method which after all this time I would have hoped GIGABYTE would have resolved. Therefore, once you have clicked on settings, you then have to resort to using the keyboard to either scroll through the available settings or enter the value manually.
Point and click is percetly adequate, which is an improvement over the UD5 which had horizontal axis issues but the UD3 suffers from scroll wheel problems in that it just doesn't work. While mouse control is 'supported' by the UEFI BIOS, it doesn't work particularly well at all. It works and it offers a good amount of features and settings, particularly in power management/adjustment but the navigation using a mouse was cumbersome at best and down right frustrating at worst. One of my criticisms of the X79-UD5 was GIGABYTE's UEFI BIOS. For todays review we used the very latest official BIOS revision available at the time of writing so my findings will be based on this BIOS. For our run of benchmarks we ran the CPU at 3.3GHz (100x33) with Speedstep and TurboBoost 2.0 disabled to ensure power saving/auto overclocking features did not interfere with the benchmark results.īefore we get to our overclocking results I feel it necessary to discuss the BIOS. Under load, our CPU automatically clocked itself to 3.6GHz and dropped back to 1.2GHz using just 0.8v when idle. Here is a shot for the board at is reference level with the BIOS set to default values (Speedstep enabled).