BIOS Walkthrough

With the board installed into our testbench, we fired it up and entered the BIOS, to be greeted by the page you see above that ASUS refers to as "Easy Mode". Containing listings of critical temperatures, voltages, as well as fanspeed, the "Easy Mode" page is ultimately very accurately named, as it allows a quick and easy interface to set boot devices, as well as do some very basic overclocking, or if you so desire, to enable power savings mode as well. Of course, the selections that are offered are a bit limited, however, we find a button at the top right of the page that says "Exit/Advanced Mode", and advanced it really is.


Entering advanced mode leads directly to the "Extreme Tweaker" page, which offers the majority of critical settings for clock speeds and voltages, and also provides access to sub-menus for things like DRAM timing adjustment, and configuration of the board's CPU VRM. There is a lot contained here, so much so that all three images above are of that same page, with only a few options overlapped between images.


The DRAM timing page has almost too many settings, many of which most users will not need access to, but those that like to customize their system for maximum performance will appreciate access to so much, so easily. Naturally, every yin needs its yang, and the downside to so many options is that the menus are HUGE, and numerous. There are a couple of things, like the "GPU.DIMM POST" page seen in the third image above, that we just don't understand the usefulness of, especially nearly hidden as they are amongst everything else. The fourth image above shows the "CPU Performance Settings" page, one of the few pages where we'd like to see a couple more settings, such as setting maximum wattage allowances as well as the current settings already available.


On the subject of current, the options for VRM customization that ASUS offers via their "Dual Intelligent Processor" design is outright amazing. From maximum current, to even VRM frequency, for three different areas of the CPU, is outright fantastic, and allows for clocking like no other motherboard maker's solution does. We cannot stress enough how valuable settings like this are, and ASUS has included technology like this in nearly every product, from entry-level, to products like the ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z, which are meant for the ultimate in performance.


Moving onto the "Main" page, we find what is normally found on near every product on the market, a bit of system information, and access to date and time settings. We were very happy to find security settings here as well, as having a dedicated page like "Extreme Tweaker" and "Main" is a bit overkill for just a couple of settings. This is one of the things that makes the multitude of settings seem like almost too much, as it's quite clear that optimization of the page layout is something ASUS considers, but seemingly there's still a little bit room for further improvement in that regard.




The next page is labeled as "Advanced", which contains subheadings which each lead into other pages that contain board-specific settings for things like onboard devices, power management, and settings for the ASUS ROG features like ROG Connect. We're not going to go into too much detail about these pages, and they really speak for themselves quite well, each with everything you expect to see under each heading, however, once again, we can't help but feel a few of these could be combined, as we have a total of eleven images here for this tab alone, as you can see.


The "Monitor" page is similar in fashion to the "Advanced" page, containing a bunch of subheadings that lead to other pages with the actual options, and again we find two more pages that have just two settings each.


The "Boot" page, on the other hand, is nearly perfect, with everything we expected. The "Tool" page contained a few surprises, including access to listings for DIMM SPD settings, as well as the page to customize the "Go Button" settings, something we wished we would have found on the last two Z68 boards we looked at that featured similar functions.


There is also a page to store several BIOS profiles, allowing users to create several different overclock profiles, and then switch between them with relative ease. During our usage testing, we experimented with this page to be pleasantly surprised to find everything in perfect working order.