BIOS

In a lot of cases, the difference in a good experience and a bad one with motherboards for me has been in the software. A lot of companies can put together a decent feature list, but software development is expensive and doesn’t immediately translate to sales so a lot of companies skimp on it. For the most part though Asus has led the charge on this bot with their BIOS and windows based software. To take a look at their BIOS I’ve done a basic walk through that shows each option and setting available at the time of our review.

So how is the UEFI? Well, once again I was surprised that I first booted into the Advanced Mode when they have an EzMode available. The EzMode basically limits what you can adjust to a few basic aspects like drag and drop boot order, turning on XMP or in this case DOCP (AMP for AMD), and you can turn on EZ Tunes.

Moving back to the Advanced Mode Asus has still kept the traditional layout so anyone who prefers a keyboard navigation can still do that but you do still get the mouse. Speaking of, the movement is smooth and doesn’t feel out of sync like most other UEFIs have issues with. So the main tab basically just shows you the current revisions, what hardware you have, and the time. You can also change the language here.

Ai Tweaker is Asus’s overclocking section. This is where you will find any CPU and memory overclocking options as well as all power/voltage control. The amount of detail you can get into gets a little crazy, you will notice it took me a little while to flip through all of the pages.

Then any option that isn’t overclocking related is all put in the Advanced tab. This includes other CPU settings, anything built into the motherboard, and stuff like USB/Hard drives/network. Each of the main options has folders within folders as well. Then from there, you have the monitor tab. This is just a listing of every sensor readout. You can also make a few Qfan setting changes here. I don’t know why these just aren’t in the Qfan Control option up top.

The Boot section is exactly what you would expect. This is where you can change the UEFI and PC boot options including boot order and how your PC will recover after the power goes out. Next is the Tool tab and this is where you will find a few useful tools. The biggest is the EZ Flash 3 utility. This is how you update the BIOS. What sets this apart is the ability to be able to download a new BIOS update while in the BIOS or the option to be able to look through your OS files to find a BIOS update you downloaded. No need for a flash drive with this setup. You also get Secure Erase if you need to really clear an old hard drive. There are a few info pages that just give more details on things like your video card and then there is the overclocking profile page. This gives you 8 profiles where you can backup different overclock configurations. This is nice for allowing you to safe known good overclocks while you play with new setups or saving good overclocks depending on the time of year.

Also up along the top, there is Qfan where you can adjust fan profiles to tune them for better performance or lower noise. Then the EZ Tuning Wizard is an easy to use overclocking tool that will do a basic overclock for you. This has improved over the years, now it asks how you will be using the computer and what kind of cooling you currently have. Then it gives you an estimate before running. Our 1800X would see about 5% with an air cooler and 8% with water cooling. Not exactly a huge jump, at 8% that would be 4.32 compared to the 4.0 XFR.

 

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