BIOS
As always I think that a good portion of the experience you have with a motherboard is with its software and the BIOS is a lot of that. So I’m going to take a look at what MSI has going for the X470 Gaming M7 AC. Rather than toss 50 pictures in here and still not show half of the options available I have put together a basic video that just runs through every feature.
So you boot into the easy mode, something that a lot of boards don’t seem to do. This page is laid out for people who don’t know their way around a normal BIOS so they don’t make any important changes that they don’t understand. MSI does give you a lot of options here though. For starters, up top, you can drag and drop boot priority, turn on the game boost overclocks just like with the knob on the board, and turn on XMP for your memory clock speeds. As you can see I have ours on to get the 3400MHz clock speeds promised with our test ram.
Getting into the advanced section, aka the normal BIOS. We have the same top bar here as in the easy mode. That is nice to have because you can see your clock speeds and temps at any point in time. From there you can open up the options on the right There is a page that lets you save and load up to 6 different overclock profiles. With that, you can also load them from a USB drive so you could actually share with friends or if you were a PC builder you could quickly copy your overclocking profile to all of your PCs. Also on the right, you can open up the hardware monitor to check temperatures, set fan profiles. Then the board explorer opens up a photo of the M7 and shows you what is hooked up and where including on the rear I/O.
Over on the left is where you get into the main BIOS options. Basically, everything is split up into two sections. The settings page has all of your board options for peripherals and built-in subsystems. Then the overclocking page has anything at all related to voltages and clock speeds for your memory and CPU. Its actually crazy just how many options were in the settings page alone, opening them all up completely took longer than normal. It didn’t help that I was having the same bug that I also experienced on the MSI B360 that I recently covered where when backing up my mouse would double click. You will notice in upcoming X470 coverage that I don’t have the issue with any other boards tested.
The overclocking section is also loaded up with options, a lot beyond the standard voltages and clock speeds. Once you open this up you can navigate with your mouse or keyboard if you prefer that. Most options come set to auto by default but you do have the option to dive in.
Overall I like what MSI has going, it is split up logically and you do boot into the easy mode as you should. Navigation was “okay” with the double click issues being the only problem but when you get sent all the way back to the start when trying to find a setting it is very frustrating.
