BIOS Walkthrough

Using the Biostar UEFI BIOS proved quite simple, and almost as complete as some of the other solutions we have looked at thus far. Upon first boot, the BIOS opens up on the main page, shown above, but once in BIOS, you can chose which “page” you’d like to pop up first on the next boot; a nice time-saving feature when overclocking. The standard "main" page is filled with the usual info, including date and time, as well as a brief listing of the board and what CPU and memory are installed. The next page, the “Advanced” page, leads into several items normally found here, including customization of onboard components like LAN and audio. It’s also worth noting that mouse support within the Biostar UEFI BIOS works quite well, allowing some ease of use not seen on other products.


The “PC Health Status” item on the “Advanced” page leads into a simple monitoring interface, which then leads into SmartFan adjustments, which are only applied to the CPU_FAN PWM header, and allowing custom fan profiles as well as several standardized modes seen on other products as seen in the second image above. The third image shows the “Chipset” page, offering settings for both southbridge options, as well as some CPU-specific items not found elsewhere.


The next page is “Boot”, whose options you can see above in both images. Fairly standard offerings are found here, yet nothing needed has been overlooked, either.


Up next is the security page, but as it only offers password settings, we’ve chosen to skip over it quickly, and move on to the important part of the BIOS, the “O.N.E.” page, or “Overclocking Navigator Engine”. As you can see by the four screenshots above, there’s a lot of options to be found here, from CPU-specific settings, to memory timing adjustment, board voltages, and at the very end, we find a really handy feature, a listing of the DIMMs installed, and access via the listings to default timings as listed in the DIMM's SPD table, for quick and easy reference. We have one specific item to point out here; contrary to other products, some of the options and their settings are the exact opposite from what we were used to, most notable of which is “CPU VCore Loadline”, which, on other products, setting to enabled would lead to more consistent load voltages, whereas on the TZ68A+, enabled actually refers to the default loadline mode as dictated by Intel; something to keep in mind when it comes to overclocking, for sure.


The final two images here are the already mentioned memory timing listings, as well as the last page, the “Exit” page, which also offers access to boot device overrides, as well as offering users an area to save several BIOS setting profiles for quick switching between stock settings and overclocked profiles, or whatever else might be required, something that we employed fairly often during our usage testing.