BIOS Walkthrough

The ASUS UEFI BIOS is pretty mature at this point, having been in use for a bit over a year now on nearly every ASUS product. Upon booting the board we are greeted with what ASUS calls "Easy Mode", an easy to use graphical interface that offers most of the basic functionality users need, including a bit of monitoring, too. You can also hit ESC or the button in the top-right corner to access the Advanced BIOS, which provides a ton of options not available in Easy Mode. Once in the Advanced mode, we are welcomed by the standard ASUS UEFI opening screen that contains time and date setting, but this time we also find security options listed here. We have been big proponents of OEMs minimizing the number of BIOS pages and optimizing the click-flow to do certain things, and ASUS is definitely listening.


Even though there are so many voltage options here, we can see the need for nearly every one, and there is nothing that stands out as being not needed. The complexity of the P8Z77-V VRM design is such that the absolute maximum options for user customization are possible, which helps ensure that all users get the most they can out of their system. The DRAM timing options are just as numerous as the voltage options, if not more so. Primary and secondary timings all fit on the first screen, but I scrolled down to find nearly three full screens lower down all filled with system memory or controller timings and options.


Moving on to the DIGI+ subheading, we find a ton of options here as well, with adjustments available not only to increase or limit current as desired, but also quite a few options to separately set the frequency of each of the VRM sections, thanks to the use of multiple controllers.


It's hard to believe that all of those options we just showed are contained within the single AI Tweaker page, especially considering how easy it is to navigate from one section to the next. Of course, that's not all, and the next page up is the Advanced page, which contains board-specific settings, as well as other CPU and memory settings that weren't contained within the AI Tweaker page.


With the BIOS offering an easy way to capture screenshots to a FAT-formatted device, it was quite easy for me to capture every single page and post them here.


Every option you could ever need is contained here, as well as a few that aren't required, but are definitely nice to have.


The monitor page doesn't actually list that much monitoring information other than a couple of temperatures and fan speeds in the top, but just below it does offer Fan Xpert settings for each Chassis fan individually, while the dual CPU_FAN headers are in their own section. Below that we find listings with a few voltages and a setting labeled "Anti-Surge Support". ASUS tells us that when overclocking, this setting in particular can be very important in reaching the maximum clocks, and we found it just as useful as they suggested. The Boot page is pretty basic, but does include a section to boot from other drives other than the primary listed.


The tools page is something I personally like A LOT. First is the tool "EZ-Flash", for BIOS updates from within the BIOS, then we have the O.C. Profile listing, for saving BIOS profiles that can be loaded very easily. The third tool is immensely useful, the SPD Tool, which displays both stock JEDEC and XMP profiles for your installed DIMMs, making manual adjustment of timings a very easy task, although a bit of knowledge is required as the options listed in BIOS for memory timings do not have the exact same labels as the SPD Tool does.

I do have to commend ASUS here for having the very best and most functional UEFI BIOS in the industry, offering a ton of options that no other OEM currently matches. These options include the SPD Info Tool for easy memory setup, as well as other features designed to cater more specifically to extreme clocking users, making this the best BIOS implementation for both every-day users and extreme users alike. It can be very hard to manage the two very different needs of those types of users, but ASUS manages it all very well, while not sacrificing stability to do so. That's a gargantuan task, so hats off to ASUS, for a job well done.