Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Review

Closer Look:

The BIOS is one area where a motherboard can be "made" or "broken." For a basic desktop, just the bare bones basics are needed. As an enthusiast, I look for a little more to be there to get the most out of my hardware. Gigabyte has used an Award BIOS for the GA-P31-DS3L. It features seven different tabs to make the adjustments to get the most out of the system used, as well as the quick and easy default and optimized settings tabs.

Standard:

The Standard CMOS setting tab allows the setting of the date and time, as well as the ability to manually or automatically set the hard drive configuration.

Advanced:

The Advanced section contains the options to change boot order and the advanced CPU features such as EIST and C1E.

Integrated Peripherals:

This tab is where the onboard device configuration is done. Sound, USB, LAN and IDE/SATA are configured here.

Power Management Setup:

This tab is where the ACPI sleep state and resume functions are set up and configured.

Plug and Play PCI:

In this tab the IRQ settings can be set automatically or manually for the three PCI slots.