BIOS Overview

With this generation of motherboards, ASUS is introducing "Q-Dashboard," which is accessible from the EZ Mode home page and serves an interactive map of your motherboard, indicating every port on your motherboard, its speed where appropriate and whether its in use. When you click a component, you are taken to its settings page. For example, clicking on a fan header option will take you to the Qfan fan control page. The only thing we'd change is labelling of PCIe Gen support on the M.2 ports. The speed/Gen is listed for the PCIe slots and USB ports—we feel it's equally important to have that information here for the M.2 ports as well, even if they're listed elsewhere.

Other new features include Dynamic OC Switcher, which aims to make sense of the plethora of ways you can tweak AMD CPUs by providing a switch to toggle between PBO settings and manual all-core overclock. The latter often provides better multi-thread performance than PBO or stock, but lower peak frequency, potentially hitting lightly-threaded performance. Core Flex aims to offer a balance between thermals and frequency and to a lesser extent, performance. From what AMD has said so far, this will mostly allow you to lower temperatures with a small to negligible hit on performance. Ideal for those with modest cooling or get anxiety if they see their CPU temperature rise above 85°C.