BIOS Walkthrough

MSI has a brand new UEFI BIOS that they are also launching with the Z68-GD65 (G3), featuring a new layout and thematic styling that matches the board's physical theme very well. Different from other UEFI implementations than we have seen before, it combines a semi-traditional interface that is surrounded by newly adopted UEFI features, including quick boot device selection, all of which are easily navigated with a mouse, or by keyboard. The top of the screen shows the date and time as well as a brief system description with the main interface below, surrounded by six panels that lead into separate areas that each contain appropriate settings. The first section, labeled "Settings", contains board-specific settings and a few other things. The first area gives a fairly standard listing of system settings for drives as well as basic CPU info, along with access to date and time adjustments.


The "Advanced" section under the "Settings" heading contains quite a few different sections, and this is where we found ourselves becoming a bit critical of MSI's new BIOS interface, as there are several headings, but very little options under them, with sometimes only one or two settings per heading, as seen the pictures above, of the PCI and ACPI pages.


The devices page is a bit better laid out, with options not only for the onboard devices, but also for each SATA port individually. We were a bit surprised to find integrated GPU settings here as well, however, as really the options here are for enabling Virtu support and selecting the primary display device, it is more appropriate than we realized. The USB page of course, offers USB-specific settings, but there are only a few, so again we were greeted by a big page with little options.


The SmartFan settings were a bit lean on options as well, with only customization of the CPU_FAN header available, a bit of a surprise considering that there is another PWM header, as well as three other separate 3-pin headers, too. Power Management was yet another area with just a couple of options, while the "wake" options are bit more involved, but we couldn't help but feel those two pages could have been combined into one. The "Boot" section, on the other hand, contained all the options that we expected, with not a single stray setting to be found.


The "OC" section, on the other hand, is probably one of the most comprehensive areas, containing a few extra options that are becoming a bit more common today, and welcome additions at that. Start with clock options, then DRAM timings, and quickly transitioning into voltages after, there are so many options here that we had to include two screenshots to be able to cover them all, never mind that there are a few very important sections hidden from immediate view until we scrolled down to the bottom. The DRAM page contains all the timings we needed to maximize memory performance, leaving not a single setting missed that we wished MSI has included.


The "CPU Specifications" options on the "OC" page simply gives a listing of the CPU's features and clock settings, with a secondary option that lists specific CPU technologies the installed CPU supports, both only offering information, information we didn't exactly need, per se, but still proves to be an interesting addition nonetheless. The CPU features page, however, contains all the options needed to overclock fully using Intel's "Turbo" feature, as well as settings to enable or disable specific CPU features as well as CPU cores themselves.


The "Memory-Z" listing contains, on the first page, a full listing of JEDEC timings, both in standard single-numbers format, as well as in nanoseconds, while at the bottom is a heading that shows XMP-related settings, both of which are read from the SPD table. The "Overclocking Profiles" section at the bottom of the "OC" page provides a section for saving six separate BIOS profiles, allowing for more than enough custom configurations for most users, as well as a simple way to switch between them. We did test how well this worked, as we have found some other products failed to load all settings properly, but we are very happy to report that MSI's implementation here worked flawlessly.


The “ECO” heading contains power-savings specific features as well as listing real-time voltages, while the "Utilities" page contains tools to back up hard drives and update the BIOS, while the "Security" page contains a few features to secure not only BIOS access, but also updating, as well as offering settings for chassis intrusion. The Browser page leads into MSI's own WINKI3, a self-contained Linux OS that offers a few basic internet applications, a quick-booting alternative to Windows for those that desire such.

MSI has done a fantastic job with their new BIOS on the Z68A-GD65 (G3). It has all the desired functionality for any overclocker, and then some, and a bunch of other add-ons that are a definite plus, too. We do question the layout in some specific areas that might make navigation a bit more convoluted than it needs to be, but at the same time, it's not a big issue that affects any sort of daily functionality of the board, either. MSI and their BIOS engineers are definitely headed in the right direction; one that we hope other OEMs adopt too.