Oh darn… I was feeling pretty good about my Gigabyte X370 Gaming 5 for $138 until I read this thread. I’m glad I found it before I build my new Ryzen rig though so I can go straight to Ket’s superior firmware. Ket, you are my hero. Thank you so much!
Anyway, I wanted to chime in about my experience with weak VRM’s. Thoughtful fan placement helps a lot here. I’ve got a old overclocked AMD FX 8120 paired with a MSI 970A-G43. I learned a lot about VRM’s with that damn MSI board. No heatsinks, CPU Throttling routinely with renders… Anyway, the game changer here is having at least one good case fan blowing right on the VRMs/VRM Heatsink. I installed a DIY heatsink as well, but the fan makes most of the difference.
On youtube Actually Hardcore Overclocking talks about using a fan on the VRMs for the Gigabyte X370 K5 motherboard while overclocking.
https://youtu.be/ZB7NG1PkGEQ?t=1m29s
The first thing I’ll do when my CPU shows up next week is remove that stupid AORIS plastic shield to get more air on the VRMs… that and a pile of fans.
The "Auto" setting in theory at least will let the system dynamically decide when the opcache is needed. Technically the "Auto" setting you can consider to be no different than the "Enabled" setting which should mean the opcache is "always on" regardless. Selecting "Disable" should force the opcache off. This is all of course on the assumption that Gigabyte haven’t broken any of the opcache options.
You are welcome 
There is a good chance different batches of the boards could use different VRMs so what I’ll list bullet style for some extra pointers is based on the VRMs my test board has.
1. Replace the plastic standoffs on the heatsinks with rubber ones. This will allow the heatsinks to be tightened down more improving thermal transfer to the heatsinks
2. Replace the stock thermal pads with some Laird 6W/m-k pads.
3. If the situation allows turn any rear exhaust fans into intake fans.
Doing those things will have a significant effect on VRM temps. The first two points alone saw VRM temps on my test board drop all the way down to 72c and that was with the CPU fully loaded with BOINC and overclocked to 3.9GHz I believe it was @ 1.38v.
I came across a motherboard review from Hardware Canucks where they claim they were able to stabilize the cpu using the Extreme Load-line Calibration (LLC) setting.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/har…-review-17.html
Essentially they were trying to stay as close to 1.35 as possible, so they used LLC cranked up to Extreme and reduced the voltage to 1.325V to compensate. With these settings in a AIDA64 stability test, “The Vcore overwhelmingly stayed at 1.344V with the occasional spike up to 1.356V.” From what I’ve read about LLC online, I’m skeptical about these results. I would expect wild voltage spikes much great than plus or minus 0.02V. Is this bogus?
I’ll likely test this when my cpu arrives later this week, Extreme LLC at low voltages of course…
It could be something to do with the design that leads to that behaviour but when I tested the Gaming 5 I used an LLC setting of "High" which is only 2 steps down from "Extreme" and with a constant 1.35v I measured minimum voltage at 1.31v and maximum voltage spikes up to 1.39v. If the "Extreme" LLC setting does drastically reduce voltage instability then I fail to see what the point in adding LLC options was Gigabyte should of just used the "Extreme" setting and just had normal voltage adjustment.
I’m considering performing some of these mods in the future (but not so soon since I would need to remove my CPU cooler to access the VRMs, my 1700 is EDIT: Being RMAed right now due to segfaults among other thing)
Can you provide a bit more detail on where to get said thermal pads and standoffs? Which thickness or kind of pad is recommended and links to international sellers is all I need.
FYI - My motherboard is staying pretty cool.
First, I followed KET’s advice on the motherboard heatsinks: 1) Replaced the thermal pad on the chipset heatsink with cpu thermal paste and screwed it back on and 2) removed the plastic standoffs on the two VRM heatsinks… I didn’t have any rubber standoffs, so I replaced the standoffs with small squares of electrical tape(made a tiny hole for the screw to go through). Then I tightened down the VRM heatsink screws as much as I could… at first the motherboard was bending, so loosened until it a little till it was straight again. Also, I was lazy and re-used the Gigabyte thermal tape…
Next, I added a stacked pair of 120mm fans blowing straight down on the VRMs. I’m using a old liquid cooler. If your using a good air cooler blowing air around, this might not be necessary.
Anyway, with this setup and my 1700X the chipset and VRM MOS temps are staying cool between 30-45 C.
Still figuring out the limits, but I’m getting 4Ghz no problem here…
UNRESPONSIVE CPU CLOCK SETTINGS IN BIOS - FIX
Earlier today on my Gigabyte X370 Gaming 5 board I noticed the CPU Clock speed was locked or stuck at the default speed. No matter what CPU Ratio or speed I set, it kept booting at the default 1700X 3400 mhz. Changes could be made with the AMD Ryzen Master software in windows, however it would reset back to 3400 mhz after rebooting. This seems to be a common problem with Gigabyte bios… I got it while running the experimental Gaming 5 bios is this thread.
To fix it I repeated some steps from KET’s bios flashing process:
1) turned off the power
2) cleared the CMOS (jumper)
3) removed the clock battery
4) hit the power button three times and waited two minutes.
5) put clock batter back, plug in power and start the computer…
After that you can still load your saved bios profiles. If your Gigabyte motherboard is acting funny, I recommend giving this a try.
1700X with Gigabyte Gaming 5 - 4,075 Mhz at 1.375 Volts with Extreme LLC
I’m getting good results with the Extreme LLC setting on the Gaming 5 Motherboard according to my HW Info voltage reading. I don’t trust that 100%, but it’s the best reading I’ve got. Between 1.35-1.39 settings, I was seeing about 20 millivolts up and down. Within that test range, my 1700X topped out at 4,075 Mhz. I was seeing a big voltage gap between 4,075 and 4,100 mhz. Anyway, I’m happy with 4,075.
Walking the voltage back down to the minimum for stability, here are my 1700X settings:
4,075 Mhz with a static 1.37500 CPU Voltage and Extreme LLC.
Limited stability testing so far - Little over 5 minutes of Prime95 and plenty of Cinebench tests [Scored 1,793]
The voltage readings at idle in the bios read 1.39-1.40 volts, but read 1.375-1.38 in Windows with CPU-Z and HW Info. Either way that’s ok by me. I just want to stay under the 1.425 threshold AMD recommends for not harming your cpu.
Cheers
Thats better than the Gaming 5 board I tested does, all increasing LLC to extreme does is make the voltage spikes higher. I suspect the spikes mostly happen due to inadequate filtering in the design as both the Chokes and MOSFETs used are decent enough although they are still a bit lacking. Very bizarre decision there, good Chokes and MOSFETs then cheap out on a few capacitors. FYI AMD say 1.45v is the maximum, but for 24/7 use I wouldn’t recommend above about 1.38v especially if the CPU is going to be under 100% load a lot of the time.
I’m considering performing some of these mods in the future (but not so soon since I would need to remove my CPU cooler to access the VRMs, my 1700 is EDIT: Being RMAed right now due to segfaults among other thing)
Can you provide a bit more detail on where to get said thermal pads and standoffs? Which thickness or kind of pad is recommended and links to international sellers is all I need.
The rubber standoffs you should be able to pick up from any good DIY store, or ebay. As for the Laird thermal pads I bought them from RS Components as they have a store near me. Thermal pads of 1mm thickness are ideal, the rubber standoffs make a great flexible solution for various thicknesses of thermal pads. In my case the temp difference on the VRMs was extremely pronounced dropping to 72c with the CPU @ 100% load running 3.85GHz 1.33v. This is because really crappy contact was being made beween the heatsinks and VRMs. The stock thermal pads possibly aren’t very good either, somewhere in the range of 2-3w/m-k I’d expect.
Overall, I’d say the next UEFI release for the Gaming 5 is its last chance to be a relatively good board if Gigabyte fail with the next release (which will be based on AGESA 1.0.0.7) then its time to completely forget about the AMD Aorus boards. Even Biostar have a UEFI for their X370GT7 that is so vastly superior it makes Gigabytes attempts look like cowboy fly by night jobs.
Just ran User Benchmark for fun:
UserBenchmarks: Game 78%, Desk 93%, Work 99%
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X - 103%
GPU: AMD R9 390 - 75.3%
SSD: Toshiba HG5d Q Series 256GB - 84.4%
HDD: Toshiba X300 6TB - 90.7%
HDD: Seagate Video SV35.6 Series 2TB - 53.4%
HDD: WD WD1004FBYZ-01YCBB1 1TB - 87.8%
USB: ASMT 2105 1TB - 73.1%
RAM: Crucial BLS16G4D240FSC.16FBR 2x16GB - 95.1%
MBD: Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming 5
As you can see using KET’s bios I’ve been able to get the most out of the CPU and ram. Thanks again
Hey thanks for what you are doing,im so disapointed with the gigabyte bios looking on how the others have a lot of options and mine seems like fisherprice bios.
I have the GA-AX370-gaming K3.
No problem guys. If I find time I’ll do a quick UB run.
I only registered here to say thank you so much for this bios for my brand new ax370 gaming 5! its opened a whole new world up for overclocking my ryzen7 1700
Could you possibly do another one and change the boot screen to the RYZEN logo?
Although i dont know how to use the P state section, i am aware its needed to sort out the cpu downclocking features, what the hell are gigabyte thinking leaving this essential module out?
thank you.
Paul.
The bios flashed perfectly!
So, How does that p-state thing work then? at the top of the page i can select between 1 and 7 but there are 7 other options below it not working, mine is the gaming 5 board. can the bios boot logo be changed.
i flashed with your gaming 5 to k7 bios revision
Thanks for the BIOS for the Gigabyte Gaming 5. I was regretting my purchase until I found this site and your modded BIOS.
I tried to flash my k3 motherboard but when i use the comand flashme.bat it says can not read the rom.How you create the bootable usb? i used rufus creating bootable freedos and droping the archives of bios there and it seems to be the only way to do it.
Can you explain all the process please to see what im missing?
Copy the .rom image to a USB drive, enter Q-Flash and flash the modified UEFI through Q-Flash instead. The pure DOS method isn’t necessary any more but I left the option to do so open for anyone that prefers to flash through DOS.
Thanks,now i have it installed but seems like on k3 board this p states overclock and boost not work.And me thinking when i bought it,i go to buy it becouse 370 goes to ofer more options…shit gibabyte
The p-states do work, they are software controlled from windows 10 itself, you need to add the code in the bios for max core speeds and leave the multipliers on AUTO for it to work