Gigabyte
Gigabyte supplies a certain number of utilities, some of which are quite original.
For example, Gigabyte is the only supplier to include the Smart Recovery backup solution. It’s a fairly simplistic tool and you’ll no doubt want to go for an alternative solution.
Another very unusual piece of software is Cloud OC. It’s a mini Web server which allows you to overclock your machine remotely. The client HTML code is optimised for smartphones with a column style display.
Like ASRock, Gigabyte also supplies a network prioritisation tool: LanOptimizer. It’s a utility developed by Realtek and rebadged by Gigabyte which offers a simplified mode which adapts automatically to a type of activity (game, Internet and so on), but also allows you to manually control softwares using the network. It also allows you to block an application.
The most original application of those supplied is without question "TouchBIOS". It’s a utility that allows you to modify the BIOS settings - a good idea but one which hasn’t been well implemented. The tool window is particularly small and its fonts particularly large. This means you have to do a lot of scrolling to get to the parameters you’re looking for, which is rather impractical. These choices result from the fact that the interface has been optimised for touchscreens. Gigabyte would have been better off giving us a tool that had been optimised for the mouse, as navigating from one menu to another is very painful, there being no back/next mouse options here for example. The button that allows you to go back to the previous page confusingly uses the icon that is usually used to reload content. Modifications are of course only effected after the machine is rebooted. Above all, Gigabyte highlights the implementation of this tool to make up for the fact that there's no UEFI BIOS. We were entitled to better here.
You’ll find other more standard pieces of software such as an application to update the BIOS by Internet, an energy economy tool and XTU, the Intel overclocking utility that requires you to restart your machine after use. EasyTune 6, that we mentioned earlier, is a bit more practical.
MSI
The MSI software offer is relatively limited, but this is perhaps for the best.
While SuperCharger (the standard for charging by USB) works perfectly, the same can’t be said for other applications.
MSI supplies ControlCenter II, a tool which can be used both for monitoring and overclocking. It has been poorly implemented and, although we restarted our machine, changes to multipliers didn’t work in our tests.
Live Update, the automatic update tool, is based on a very good idea but is also somewhat badly implemented. Apart from detecting BIOS updates for your motherboard, it offers to download drivers which don’t really correspond to your card. This is most probably a model detection issue.
Note finally, that on each application installation, MSI offers to sign you up for their newsletter by default and redirects you to a web page. Like its UEFI BIOS, the MSI software offer is a definite minus.
