BIOS Walkthrough

ECS has a new UEFI BIOS design for the AMD A75 series, one that much more closely resembles what we've seen from other OEMs, starting off with an "Easy Mode" that offers just a few critical settings that the majority of PC users will need, while the remainder of settings, for more advanced users, is separate, accessed by pushing the "Advanced" button. The main page of the advanced mode is shown above in the second image, which, as you can tell, contains standard settings for date and time settings, as is common on nearly every board out there today. There are several other pages that can be accessed by clicking the respective tab for each, or you can use your arrow keys to navigate through them.


The main page under the "Advanced" tab leads to several other pages that contain settings for the board, CPU, as well as settings for onboard devices and the like. Devices are separated into menus by type, and even the system's health monitoring page has another menu, which leads to the SmartFan settings you see in the last image above.


We find settings for "Power Management", "ACPI", "CPU Configuration", and "SATA Control" all contained on their own pages, as shown in the images above. This makes it quite easy to find the setting you are looking for, although some titles, such as "CPU Configuration", can be a bit misleading, offering just a few of the expected settings, but the reasoning behind such organization becomes clear once each page has been visited.


The final two items under the "Advanced" tab are shown above, containing listings for USB configuration and serial port control.


Under the "Chipset" tab we are greeted by a page with just two options, one for the North Bridge, and one for the South Bridge. The northbridge page contains settings for the onboard graphics, which is kind of misplaced, as the iGPU is part of the APU, and not the board itself, as no APU board even contains a North Bridge, as that is now in the APU itself too! The South Bridge heading, on the other hand, is a bit more appropriate, containing settings for the onboard audio and settings for what state the board should enter after power loss, yet perhaps the SATA and USB settings could have been contained here as well, given the page labels, and given that both SATA and USB control is taken care of by the AMD A75 FCH.


That brings us to the "M.I.B." tab, which we were disappointed to find, doesn't provide us access to Men In Black. Instead, it provides critical clock and voltage settings, as seen in the first image above. "Boot", "Security", and "Save & Exit" tabs follow up just behind, finally showing a few more pages that contain all the settings we expected, and lacking nothing, either. As per the usual for ECS "Black Series" BIOSes, the "Save & Exit" page does contain an area for users to store profiles as well, to make switching between stock and overclocking profiles simple and easy.