UEFI and Software

Asus has lead the market for a few years now on the software front. They were the first to combine everything into a single program to make their software easy to use and give more reason to even install the software at all. On top of that their AISuite has made it almost unnecessary to even work in the BIOS for most situations. Overclocking, voltage, and VRM settings can all be made right in windows. For Z97 this software hasn’t really changed, not that it needed too. For the Z97-A still have full DIGI+ VRM control as well as a new feature called the Turbo App that lets you select specific running applications to give them CPU priority as well as network priority. You can even select the audio preset that you would like to use when hearing sound from that specific program. If you like to tweak and tune you could really have fun with this and improve your user experience. For example, you could set steam to have a low network priority and your games to have a high CPU and network priority so steam updates wouldn’t cause a latency issue when playing an online game.

With everything that you can do in their AiSuite software, it’s surprising that Asus still managed to make using their UEFI BIOS so easy. If you are looking to make a simple change or two you can stay on the EZ Mode page. They have even included a few small overclocking features like the ability to turn X.M.P. mode on or off. If you want to get into more in depth features the Z97-A does have them in the advanced section. Navigating the BIOS easier and more fluid than the Gaming 5 that I took a look at yesterday. This says a lot because the Gaming 5’s BIOS was actually really nice. Asus’s BIOS is a little more refined and doesn’t have any of the quirks that the MSI BIOS had. I highly recommend that you take a look at the video below that flips through all of the options available in the Z97-A’s BIOS. It is a lot more than I expected from a mainstream board!