BIOS Walkthrough

The ECS A990FXM-A, like most products on the market today, comes equipped with a fully customized UEFI BIOS, that greets us at first with a very simple page, as seen in the first image above. There's very little to set here, but there is the option to click the grey "Advanced" button to get into some more in depth options. Once having done so, we find ourselves in a familiar "Home" screen, with options for language and setting the date and time. Pressing the right arrow key gets us to the next section, labeled "advanced", which contains the majority of settings for onboard devices and board-specific features, the first of which is enabling and disabling the LAN controllers, as seen in the fourth image above.


The three images above continue in the "Advanced" area, with the first two showing what's available under the "PC Health Status" heading, which leads to some brief monitoring data, as well as providing access to some SmartFan controls that have independent selections available for both the CPU_FAN plug, as well as the "SYS_FAN" plug. With many boards only offering adjustments for the "CPU_FAN" port, we were happy to see a bit more offered here. The third image shows what's available under the "Power Management" heading, and it's worth noting that the ECS A990FXM-A supports dual-color LEDs found on some cases and aftermarket switches.


That of course leads into the headings for "ACPI", "CPU Configuration", "SATA Configuration", and "USB Configuration". Each is pretty much self-explanatory, but we do feel that perhaps the "ACPI" page could have been included with the "Power Management" options, as is seen on many other products. We've taken images of every BIOS page bar none, and the ECS A990FXM-A does have fewer pages than some others, so while it's not the most optimal, it's hardly an issue that holds any weight on final scoring of the product.


The "Chipset" tab only contains a single heading for the South Bridge, under which we find just two options; one for what the board will do when power is lost, and one for the onboard audio. Again, both of these options could have been placed elsewhere, or perhaps the SATA options should have been listed here as well to help fill the page out, but once again, nothing to be too concerned about. The next main page, labeled "M.I.B. X", contains all the tweaking options for CPU and memory, including frequencies, timings, and voltages, with a few voltages listed down at the bottom as well. The "Power Plane" options give access to CPU-specific settings, including CPU multiplier.


The "Memory Control" heading contains memory specific options, of course, including the memory divider and timings, although the timing selection is a bit limited compared to what some other products offer. We were very happy to see the "HT Control" heading offer access to both HT link width as well as HT multi options, and ECS even had the foresight to include listings that show the current enabled options, which makes choosing your options fairly simple and easy. It's also worth noting that there are only three voltage options in the "M.I.B. X" heading; CPU, NB and DRAM are the only options here, where perhaps the addition of CPU_NB voltage, as well as maybe a CPU_NB multiplier selection, would have been more than welcome.
The last two images above show the "Boot" and "Security" pages, both of which contain only the options you'd expect; "Boot" lets you choose the order of boot devices, and security lets you set an Administrator password for the BIOS itself, handy for those that have little fingers in the house who cannot help but push buttons, as sometimes happens in the TPU motherboard test lab.


With all of that said, we are left with just one last page, the "exit" page. We find fairly standard options here, with one twist; down at the bottom we find options to boot from a specific device, handy when you need to boot from a device that is not normally one of the primary boot options, such as needing to boot from a DVD or USB drive for memory testing, or to perhaps start Windows installation, which is an option we undertook ourselves when installing our OS.

To sum it all up, we found the BIOS to be very easy to use, and the menu options, while not 100% to our personal preference, did contain the majority of options we need from a high-level product such as the ECS A990FM-A. It is worth mentioning that there were quite a few options missing as well, as we mentioned earlier, and specifically the "CPU_NB" options that were not to be found anywhere. When it comes to overclocking, the options available in BIOS can greatly impact a user's overclocking experience, so we do hope to see some improvement in this area, and we have submitted feedback to ECS informing them of what we would like to see changed. Hopefully we will get an updated BIOS soon, as the most recent BIOS is a couple of months old at this point.