Hah! I doubt that would be said if they read the first post here. Gigabyte are slacking, and lazy, compared to the competition. It’s that simple. I use an Asrock X370 Gaming K4 that absolutely blows the Gigabyte boards out of the water in both the quality of the UEFI and choice of hardware components the board uses. An example; the Aorus Gaming 5 test board I have to set 1.35v for the CPU to have it stable @ 3.82GHz and the voltage bounces arounnd all over the place ranging from 1.33v - 1.39v. The K4 on the other hand for 3.82GHz I set 1.32v and I actually get 1.32v and it is rock solid.
Gigabyte are utterly failing. They can’t even get the “Auto” voltage settings right. Just look at the SOC voltage, if left on “Auto” when overclocking it will skyrocket to 1.25v! That is absolutely not necessary, 1.1v is more than enough. If you want you can also tell Gigabyte I expect something from them for my time doing what they can’t be bothered to do.
First post now updated with the first 3 modded UEFIs
I agree, they are not giving proper support to their motherboards. It’s also the first time I get a Gigabyte motherboard, I usually buy ASUS, (didn’t want to go ASUS because most boards were having issues at the start). I picked up Gigabyte because according to their QVL it was easy to pick a set to run at 3200mhz, so I thought they had advantage compared to other brands, the components were also top quality. But QVL List was a lie, reviews that I saw were a lie, pretty disappointed.
My local store didn’t sell ASRock, otherwise my pick would be ASRock Fatal1ty K4 as well.
I agree, the voltage bounces way too much, I have the “Auto”/“Default” settings with a 1600X and I get this >
Using Official F9a, until I see your new modded bios 
Voltage reaches 1.523, ppl say it’s normal because of XFR but still I think it’s dangerous to reach so high. Unfortunately I am afraid of overclock in such a messy bios, I already have the soft brick issue and sometimes my PC freezes after entering windows ( no idea why, because it only happens once in 1 or 2 months - Only had this problem with Official Bios).
With modded bios MF5, I had only one bluescreen before seeing the starting windows login screen. No idea why it happen
XFR will cause the CPU to pump a quite alarming amount of voltage to it, which is why high quality VRMs and a good numer of them are important to ensure voltage supply is stable and reliable but Gigabyte fail in that regard. In 2017, failing to keep a stable voltage supply is both unacceptable and laughable wholly proving that corners are cut to save a few pennies in important areas. There was at least one honest review for the Aorus boards, I wrote it. You just missed it it seems 
CLICKY. I do need to fix that review up due to the image host I was using going full evil. It’s not quite the review I would usually write as it was done when I did it for a small local group of nerds who have their own local magazine. I might outright replace the review with the original I wrote now I can I don’t have to abide by certain styles the editor wanted. The conclusion in the original article was pretty much the same though, the Aorus 5 hardware is fairly good, dodgy voltage stability notwithstanding, but the board(s) are utterly let down by the quality of the UEFI making the board very hard to recommend.
First post now updated with the rest of the modded UEFIs
I might cut back on the amount of UEFIs I mod it depends which ones seems to be popular and which ones aren’t.
Is there a way to flash these bios under linux? I see it is a .exe file so I can’t run it normally.
Another question, how do I know there isn’t any other hidden things in the bios, security is a big concern for a lot of members in my community.
Its about trust, nobody’s compelling anyone to flash it, neither is anyone forced to. You want you try, you don’t want to, you don’t try its as simple as that. Those who have trust issues can stay away. Its no like this is paid or the OP is getting rewards for his work that he has to guarantee about stuff on here. Its a huge thing in itself that he has took the time and energy to do it for the community. What more should we expect? A formal deed on the integrity of the files? Hmm…
Hello there. Because it seems like you have decent knowledge about MoBo and BIOSes, I would like to ask for your opinion.
I posted one issue on Gigabyte forum twice and contacted Gigabyte support once about this but can you please take look at this and tell me what you think about this?
Here is the link to my Gigabyte forum post:
http://forum.gigabyte.us/thread/1542/ori…&scrollTo=11360
Basically, what you said is true. Voltage is fine during idle - I set 1.125V with 3.52 GHz and its great. I run stress test and voltage drops hard to 1.075V on LLC Auto. That’s 0.05V vdroop! LLC Auto is somewhere between Normal and High. After setting it to High I’m getting about 0.04V vdroop, from 1.125V to about 1.087V. Changing LLC to Turbo (one step higher from High) helped with voltage a lot - I had only 0.02V vdroop but it was overvolting a little bit sometimes up to 1.144V for a split second when going from full load to idle. Not that bad considering better stability and possibility to drop voltage down in idle/low load.
And here is where the problems start. For some reason after cold boot I got 1.188V once instead of the one that I set (about 0.05V higher). Changing voltage down by 2 steps, rebooting and up by 2 steps fixed it and it was back where it was before. Another issue is sensors going crazy, voltage going up to 2.744V or power usage up to 600W for a split second. Weird. Broken sensors? Or… LLC not working correctly, providing too high voltage/amps to the CPU for a split second?
During tests it occured when I was @ 1.144V and 3.6 GHz with LLC Turbo and @ 1.3V and 3.8 GHz with LLC Turbo. I tried to stabilize 3.8 GHz as best as possible and started tuning LLC. LLC Auto would give me huuuge about 0.07V vdroop. That’s 1.3V -> 1.23V. LLC Turbo helped but these weird issues started happening (mostly during gaming or medum usage).
The only sensor that picked this up is the main Ryzen 1700 sensor. MoBo didn’t pick it up, VRM sensors didn’t pick it up. Perhaps an issue directly between VRM and CPU itself (so most likely LLC)?
Changing LLC down from Turbo to High got rid of all these issues with wrong voltage + weird sensor readings so I’m almost sure LLC Turbo is the culprit here.
Do you think it is because of not the best VRM or BIOS/LLC issue? Is there anything that you can suggest or do with this?
Ket thanks for your answer, I read your old review, if I had read it before I wouldn’t have bought G5.
BTW any board you recommend on B350 and X370???
I might buy something better in the future and I would like to have your opinion.
Honestly, Asrock make excellent boards. Their Gaming X or Killer SLI are excellent choices. The latter particularly if you don’t mind losing a few more minor features but gaining what the X370 chipset offers over the B350 at a similar price to a lot of B350 boards. I’ve not used any B350 boards (yet anyway) but again I’d say go Asrock, the AB350 Gaming K4 is the best I’ve seen in terms of VRMs. I’d wager the AB350 K4 is better than any of the Gigabyte AM4 boards. Asrock also support their boards superbly, better than any other manufacturer IMO and I’ll even stick my reputation on the line when saying that.
You can flash the UEFI by making a bootable USB stick with Rufus or any other utility that allows you to make a bootable device with anything like FreeDOS. Regards your second question which is rather an odd one, all I can say is that the UEFIs are no less secure than the stock versions and I’ll do my upmost to ensure any UEFI I mod does not brick the board it is going on to. I’m a perfectionist and do not like even the smallest of errors.
Hello there. Because it seems like you have decent knowledge about MoBo and BIOSes, I would like to ask for your opinion.
I posted one issue on Gigabyte forum twice and contacted Gigabyte support once about this but can you please take look at this and tell me what you think about this?
Here is the link to my Gigabyte forum post:
http://forum.gigabyte.us/thread/1542/ori…;scrollTo=11360
Basically, what you said is true. Voltage is fine during idle - I set 1.125V with 3.52 GHz and its great. I run stress test and voltage drops hard to 1.075V on LLC Auto. That’s 0.05V vdroop! LLC Auto is somewhere between Normal and High. After setting it to High I’m getting about 0.04V vdroop, from 1.125V to about 1.087V. Changing LLC to Turbo (one step higher from High) helped with voltage a lot - I had only 0.02V vdroop but it was overvolting a little bit sometimes up to 1.144V for a split second when going from full load to idle. Not that bad considering better stability and possibility to drop voltage down in idle/low load.
And here is where the problems start. For some reason after cold boot I got 1.188V once instead of the one that I set (about 0.05V higher). Changing voltage down by 2 steps, rebooting and up by 2 steps fixed it and it was back where it was before. Another issue is sensors going crazy, voltage going up to 2.744V or power usage up to 600W for a split second. Weird. Broken sensors? Or… LLC not working correctly, providing too high voltage/amps to the CPU for a split second?
During tests it occured when I was @ 1.144V and 3.6 GHz with LLC Turbo and @ 1.3V and 3.8 GHz with LLC Turbo. I tried to stabilize 3.8 GHz as best as possible and started tuning LLC. LLC Auto would give me huuuge about 0.07V vdroop. That’s 1.3V -> 1.23V. LLC Turbo helped but these weird issues started happening (mostly during gaming or medum usage).
The only sensor that picked this up is the main Ryzen 1700 sensor. MoBo didn’t pick it up, VRM sensors didn’t pick it up. Perhaps an issue directly between VRM and CPU itself (so most likely LLC)?
Changing LLC down from Turbo to High got rid of all these issues with wrong voltage + weird sensor readings so I’m almost sure LLC Turbo is the culprit here.
Do you think it is because of not the best VRM or BIOS/LLC issue? Is there anything that you can suggest or do with this?
I’d start by setting every voltage you aren’t adjusting to the "Normal" value. The boards throw an insane amount of voltage at components otherwise when you start overclocking. I don’t know if it would help with voltage stability that much but when I took the VRM heatsinks off the Gaming 5 I reviewed I saw that the heatsinks made extremely poor contact with the VRMs, something which I naturally promptly corrected as I didn’t want anything melting on the board under high load tests and killing my other hardware. When I corrected the poor contact problem I replaced the plastic standoffs with slitly lower rubber ones and replaced the thermal pads with Laird 6W/mk pads, the very same NASA used to use on the space shuttle. The most stable LLC setting I found was "High", it still wasn’t perfect but it kept the voltage stable at the baseline that was needed for 3.82GHz. I wasn’t impressed by the voltage bouncing all the way up to 1.39v though. Put bluntly, the VRMs on the Aorus Gaming 5 at least are crap. The kind of voltage stability I saw I would expect to see on a cheaper A320 or B350 board, not an X370. I would say Gigabyte should be ashamed of themselves… but well, look of the state of the UEFI for these boards Gigabyte positively revel in the same company as the word "poor". I wouldn’t value Gigabytes boards at anything more than the cost of the box they arrive in, they are junk that looks pretty with their flashing lights and nothing more.
Yes, the first thing that I ever did was changing voltage. When I saw 1.224V on SOC after flashing new BIOS when I first got it I knew I have to change it. I also noticed that RAM voltage is actually 0.02V higher than you set it in BIOS, so 1.35 is 1.37, 1.36 is 1.38. Perhaps Gigabyte did that to make their motherboard "more stable" than other companies.
Do you think heatsinks will help with voltage? Temp on my VRM is perefctly fine, usually 50-60 with medium-high load. Getting up to high 60-low 70 during stress tests.
The only problem for me is that huge vdroop and strange readings on sensors with voltage up to 2.744V and weird 600W power consumption. LLC High still gives me 0.04V vdroop but it’s better than Auto.
@ket :
So if someone asks you you will say ASS-rock is the greatest AMD partner for boards, is this a joke ? Seems ROG Crosshair VI is inferior if someone asks you ?
Do you know what i did learn after many years, that Gigabyte did start using superior build quality and quality of components since slot 1 boards on the old PII/PIII platform, the dual bios as well. I know other things about the quality of ASS-Rock that sucks and is total crap. What about my story bying asrock 990FX Extreme 4 in the launch of FX Vishera 8350, and this board was total i repeat total disaster, it not even boot, did got some memory contact issue, later i did fix this after many head bangs on the wall. After this i did get really unstable system on windows, broken performance, changing the memory kit did not fix this, i even did ask for brand new Extreme 4 board, because i thought the first board was buggy or some. Well the same crap, the board was unstable, no matter what i do, i did change the CPU with other, the memory kit, even the board was brand new, not the first brand new not working asrock, nothing did fix the problems. The fix was called Gigabyte, i did get from friend a Gigabyte UD3 990FX board to test my components, guess what no instability problems, no crashing, no nothing all was working. Then i decided to buy ASUS just like that, and all was working like a charm…
So this was story about the trash “quality” of ASS-rock boards, now they are in my blacklist because they are so quality and well made…
About the quality i have seen the ASS-rock quality and was not impressive, just something like cheap brand will do normal boxes, normal components, packaging nothing really interesting or better…
While the Aorus feels premium even the box feels premium, or you will lie about this ? I see you call the X-Fi sound software trash as well, so i did test it, i did test the onboard audio of the realtek, i did have also Creative X-Fi Titanium HD, and i did have before on AM3+ Xonar Essence ST, so you cant tell me that this software sucks, simply because i have enough experience to say that for on board audio it sound really nice, after all is free and no one pays for it gigabyte include this....<br /><br />About Aorus overclocking, the components there and the bios make the job done, in the overclockers forum some guys did test both Aorus K7 and ROG CHVI and they both was on par on CPU and memory overclocking, even some guys did reach 4000MHz memory on Aorus K7...<br />The bios is a bit crap on the Gigabyte whole AM4 series, but asrock is not better i did saw the problems there, you cant even adjust the CPU clock die to bugs and problems.
And yes the retarded BIOS update last days from gigabyte the overvolt the processors was absolutely broken, sucks, retarded and is total unacceptable, no comment about that this should never happened…
About the rest Gigabyte did have superior quality on their motherboards and video cards even before 1999, asrock was not even founded back then, and i collect old hardware, asrock is same quality as ECS back then, and today is a bit better, but not so much. Back in the days on AMD K7 Athlon XP ABIT was the very best on quality followed by Gigabyte, even ASUS was total crap back then, and asrock was not even considered as something…
I also know one friend that uses his Gigabyte board on his Phenom II machine since the release of that processors, and it still works great. Other guy that worked for not one computer store, he did tell me Gigabyte have lower RMA count then asus, not to speak about asrock. Other guy i know working at some pc service, did tell me the as well the pile of Gigabyte boards is way smaller then the one of the other brands…
And i say all of that because i did research about the brands years back then, just to know what is better and more reliable, and not to say how great Gigabyte is, all my facts here are from my personal experience and what i saw when i did go to not one place where was big computer shop to see the service and what they do there, and what brand is trash, what is better and something…
And i did buy Aorus AM4 board simply following all the facts above + all the features Gigabyte offers, the price that it comes, the quality of the board, and the bios sucks but they will fix it at some point, it was easy for me to buy ASUS ROG Crosshair VI, but why is not that much better, and lacks lot of features that the Aorus have…
About all other and i see your signature you buy/use only ASS-rock boards, so you look simply like fanboy of this brand, while i did have use ASUS, EpoX, Soltek, ABIT, Gigabyte, ASrock, Tyan, Chainteck, MSI, DFI, and others can`t remember…
And by far the ASrock was trash and low quality components, ABIT is one of the great both quality and stability, Gigabyte have great quality as well, but buggy bioses, asus depend some are great other sucks bad, Epox is great but low quality components, DFI and LanParty is a legends…
EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded fully quoted post replaced by directly addressing to the author (to save space)
The poor voltage regulation is just down to bad engineering and / or bad choice of physical components. Gigabyte need to forget about such things as the shitty LED lights and dual audio codecs and put that money in to putting better VRMs on the board and developing a UEFI thats actually functional. I mean for christ sake releasing a UEFI that volts a CPU to death is just absolutely piss-poor QC and completely inexcusable. As is external USB HDDs constantly disconnecting when in use and connected to front USB ports. Don’t even get me started on how barren the UEFI is lacking basic functionality and options every other manufacturer has…
Regards VRM temp, to truly test them out download and run BOINC, one of their projects like SETI is excellent as a CPU stability test, which in turn makes it excellent at heating up the VRMs to see how they truly handle a high load.
@Radical_Vision :
This is the one and only post I will make of this nature, any more I’ll simply ask Fernando to delete them as this is not what this thread is for.
1. I just made a recommendation. Nowhere have I said Asus make bad boards. Asrock used to be a subsidiary of Asus in fact until they too wanted to get in on the high end mainboard game.
2. Bad experiences happen, but a single bad experience is certainly not enough to write anything off. Its ironic you call me a fanboy just because I recommended some Asrock boards when you come in to this thread acting like nothing but an Asrock hater repeatedly referring to them as “Ass-rock”. That alone almost made me completely ignore your post.
3. I wonder what relevence you think old Gigabyte boards or any other of that old hardware you bring up have on what the current Gigabyte boards are like. Simply put: none. In my 22 years of IT I’ve purchased and recommended mainboards from countless brands including DFI, Asus, Asrock, MSI, Gigabyte, Abit, and some others but I forget who they were now. In that time the only boards that died on me were Asus boards, so you see history is absolutely no indication of how reliable or good current mainboards are. Just because a manufacturer was good in the past does not mean it is still a good manufacturer. To that end the Gigabyte of old is not the Gigabyte of present, Asus, Asrock, even MSI, are all preferable now. Gigabyte are coasting on the reputation of how good they used to be and now are arrogant enough to still believe they are the greatest when they are far from it. You seem to be very touchy about Gigabyte as well, making you appear to be the fanboy.
4. Gigabyte Aorus boards are lacking features in the UEFI every other manufacturer has as standard, would you or would you not agree that that is unacceptable? Releasing a UEFI that volts the CPU to death is also sloppy Quality Control, further proof Gigabyte are half-arsing things. Also saying “they will fix it at some point” is hardly a glowing recommendation that will put beliefe in people is it? So, while manufacturers like Asus, MSI, and Asrock are all busily fixing and improving their boards with UEFI updates it’s ok to buy a Gigabyte board because they might at some point fix all the bugs and issues their boards have. Right. OK then.
Let’s not mention numerous other issues that should be resolved by now in a UEFI update yet still are not. There is already plenty of proof to show the inferior choice of components Gigabyte use particularly when it comes to VRM quality, and make no mistake, that is one of the biggest things Gigabyte are being critisised of here along with the quality of the UEFI, the VRMs quality.
5. Who cares about what the packaging looks like as long as the product itself is well protected? I also have several other X370 boards here which cost the same or less as the Gaming 5 that have much superior VRMs and voltage stability but also their respective UEFIs are far more feature rich, far less buggy, and not clunky as all hell to navigate compared to the Gigabyte UEFI.
Right, I think that covers everything your post was kind of hard to follow as it wasn’t well structured. I find any such delusional “loyalty” completely pointless. I am a man of facts, something is either good, or its not. The AM4 Gigabyte boards are not, but they could be if Gigabyte took their collective thumb out of their arse and paid the boards the attention they need.
EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded fully quoted post replaced by directly addressing to the author (to save space)
After trying to OC more and running into problems I now wish I had gotten a different board. (but I didn’t and still don’t have much of a choice, and the only importer of Asrock boards here is an “Intel Technology Partner” and most stores don’t even sell the Intel ones. I originally wanted the Taichi…)
Vdroop is INSANE. At LLC Auto it’s at least 0.08v, and no matter what I set the LLC to there is a difference of 0.08v between motherboard and CPU measured (SVI2 TFN) voltage at load. Even LLC Turbo does not eliminate Vdroop between idle and load (still >0.01v). One thing to note though is that the voltage measured by the CPU is stable at a consistent load. I think it could be that the board itself was not designed for high current draw, or maybe the socket might be the culprit?
My CPU (1700) reports that it draws 85w at stock(!) settings in a stress test, which is far from the 65w rating of it. Not sure who’s fault this is (CPU, sensors, VRMs - help appreciated) or if it was the reason why the Wraith Spire was insufficient (81C in stress test) for me at 3.475GHz auto voltage (reported 125w in a stress test). Now that I have upgraded my cooling I am trying to OC higher, but the Vdroop issue is very limiting.
Another issue I found is that the glue holding the backplate to the board is bad, and has completely evaporated from the heat. The VRM cooling is terrible.
At least I am able to get relatively good memory speeds with my 2x16GB dual-ranked Hynix memory, but I only need 1.0v SoC, not 1.2+!
The UEFI is trash, and I have mentioned the unfixed bugs plenty of times, but the “new” UI seems to be infecting their Intel boards as well! My brother has a B150M-D3H (IIRC) recieved a recent UEFI update replaced the previous clean high-resolution UI with the same clunky tile-based UI we have on AM4!
Hi ket,
you seem very knowledgeable and as an early adopter I’m like many other people now stuck with the somewhat pathetic Gaming 5. Still have to try your modded BIOS when I find the time, but it looks promising.
Do you have any general recommendations for settings, especially voltages, as it seems the “optimized defaults” seem to suck. Of course only if it’s not too much trouble. And is p-state overclocking working stable?
You also mentioned you replaced the standoffs of the VRM Heatsink for better contact, can you maybe link which ones you used? Don’t have spare money to buy a new board, but I would be able to spend a few moneys to make it suck less.
Thanks.
Hey ket, thanks for fixing Gigabyte’s bios, since I couldn’t download the regular one from the Gigabyte website, I tried to give yours a shot. Flashing went well and I am getting some nice results already, but my system does not let me restart normally anymore. Either after “Save and Exit” in the bios or Windows restart option, I have to use the restart button at my case to resolve a state of a reboot not resolving. Any ideas for troubleshooting?
I have not had those issues at all but heres some things you can look in to; My first thought is to do a full CMOS reset by removing the power cord and battery, pressing the power button 2-3 times, waiting 30 seconds then seeing how things go. I’d also check the Windows logs as its also very possible there is a process taking its sweet time ending when trying to restart or shut down, you might also have a SATA related sleep issue which can exhibit such behaviour as the system being very sluggish and slow to respond. I know its affecting some users on some boards from various manufacturers I’ll be unhiding this option in the future to help out any users that may be suffering the SATA sleep issue. Lastly you could also try switching your boot drive so its on SATA 1 and doing the usual tuneup duties such as cleaning up junk and temp files, deleting old restore points, registry cleanup and doing a HDD defrag.
First thing to do is set any voltages you are not adjusting to the "Normal" value. The "Auto" setting throws a stupid amount of volts around. To help with voltage stability set LLC to "High". The reason for the very poor voltage stability is due to the VRMs, the CPU stage does not have enough of them and they are not particularly good quality. The best I’ve been able to find out as there is no real details available for them is that they are probably only capable of 240A. If you are going to have as few VRMs as some (all?) of these Aorus boards do you need to make sure the VRMs are good quality or add a few more VRMs. As far as the Gaming 5 goes Gigabyte have stuck a X370 chipset on a B350 board. In other words the board would be considered good if it had a B350 chipset on it instead and a lower price, but it doesn’t.
As I mentioned to orondf, set the voltages to the "Normal" value that you aren’t adjusting that will stop the board from throwing silly amounts of voltage around. As for the rubber standoffs I couldn’t point you to which they are as I already had them in my box of tricks. I do remember they are about 5mm tall though which when tightened down on to the board compress to about 3mm. I’d also advise getting some good thermal pad strips, I use LAIRD 6W/m-K which is what NASA used to use on the space shuttle. If nothing else fixing the really rather poor contact the VRMs have with the heatsinks will allow for much better heat transfer which should help with stability to some degree at higher voltages / temps / load conditions. I’d also leave the part of the plastic shroud off that covers the VRM heatsink its only impeding airflow and thus doing nothing but helping to trap heat. Its not necessary but while you are at it you might want to remove the SB heatsink and replace the pad with some Thermal Grizzly paste to finish things off.
Thanks for your reply! Just a small follow up question, do you mean with normal voltages the ones displayed in the BIOS?
No, as you cycle through the voltage options there is one that is literally called “Normal”, select that and it’ll stop silly voltages being applied when overclocking