BIOS

Being our first experience with an Asus board in a long time I was impressed right away by Asus’s implementation of an EFI BIOS. First, you are greeted with their “EZ Mode”. This is the first time I think I have been into a bios screen that I really wouldn’t have any problem with looking at all of the time. All of your important information like temperature, voltage, and fan speed are in front of you and easy to read. You even have a nice clock up in the top left corner! OZ Mode only consist of this main page, making it easy for someone without any knowledge to do what they need to do without doing much damage. I love how they did the boot priority even though you can’t see it in the photo below(we only had our OS drive installed at the time). You can see all of the hard drives and disc drives installed and just drag them into the order needed. This is a perfect example of a EFI interface being helpful without using a mouse just to use a mouse.

Clicking on the top right of the EZ BIOS will get you to the Advanced Mode. It may not be as simple and easy as the EZ mode, but it is still easy to dig through for any enthusiast.

The Ai Tweaker tab is where most of you will spend most of your time. Your BCLK, CPU Ration, and memory frequency are all that you will need to mess with when doing a mild overclock.  Asus has put those options right at the top to give you easy access to them. Below them you have options for more detailed timing control of your ram, voltage management, and their OC turner.

The advanced tab brings you multiple folders of options for configuring onboard devices, USB, SATA, PCH, and even another CPU configuration page. Oddly enough they even included an option to adjust the CPU multiplier in this tab as well.

The monitor tab does just what the title says, allow you to monitor your temperatures and voltages. You can play with the CPU and Chassis fan profiles and even their minimum speed.

The boot options are not nearly as simple as what you get in the EZ Mode but you also get a few more options as far as booting up with the full screen logo, numlock on bootup, and even an option to turn off that pesky wait for F1 to be pressed error that drives me crazy on one of our headless servers.

To top it all off you also have a tool box tab that gives you access to the OC profiles and their BIOS flash utility. All in all this has to be one of the best BIOS I have ever worked with, bar none!