UEFI and Software

It might seem like a small thing but software can play an important role in your overall experience with a motherboard. When software is bad you will find yourself not wanting to install it at all. This isn’t been an issue with Asus boards for me for a very long time. Their AI Suite software has impressed me over and over every single time I get the chance to use it. The Impact has the same AI Suite III software once again, in fact short of a few small differences there isn’t much different between this time around compared to any other time. With this being an ROG board the software does have the red and black theme with the ROG logo up in the top left corner.

When you open the software up the home page has a lot going on right from the start. Asus has put a small part of each section of the software on the homepage. That means you can see the current overclock percentage, see how much energy you are saving, peak at fan and DIGI+ Power settings. On top of all of that along the bottom we can see all of our voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds.

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When we start clicking on sections we can finally get a better look at just how much we can do and change in the software. For manual overclocking we can change every voltage setting and overclock all of your cores together or do them individually.

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The turbo page is really interesting as well. In the past we have seen the option to give network priority to specific programs but here Asus is allowing us to go beyond that and even set performance priority. All you have to do it select the programs you want to give priority and then from there you can put them in order from highest to lowest priority.

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On top of easy to use fan setting options that anyone can use Asus also gives us the option to select any one fan and map out how it will spool up compared to temperatures.

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DIGI+ means we have full control of how the Impact handles its power delivery. There are easy to use settings as well as more detailed options over on the right. As you make changes there is a small graph that shows how the changes affect energy and performance.

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We can also get into power saving features. Here we can set when the monitor will turn off, how AI Suite will handle power savings with voltage changes, and even fan profiles while the PC is idle.

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In addition to the main pages in AI Suite, up in the top right corner you can click and open up a page full of additional options. Here we can get into things like USB 3.0 Boost that I love so much.

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While to be completely honest you can get almost everything done in AI Suite, that doesn’t mean that Asus left their UEFI alone. Asus’s UEFI’s have been leading the market for years now. When you first boot into the UEFI I was surprised to find that on the Impact It took me right into the advanced options page, normally you would be taken into the EZ Mode to prevent someone who is inexperienced getting into options that could cause damage. The EZ Mode has all of the basic features including a nice drag and drop hard drive boot priority section.

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When you get back into the advanced mode you are placed right into all of your overclocking options. Asus calls this the Extreme Tweaker section, here we can get into anything overclocking related. That include voltage controls, CPU and RAM overclocking, you name it.

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The next tab is a lot less exciting, this is the “Main” tab but basically here you will find information on the UEFI build, basic information on the memory and CPU, and options to select the UEFI language.

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The Advanced tab is where the meat of the options are, here Asus has broken things down by subsystem. You can get in and configure or turn off features all over the motherboard. This includes chipset options, USB, CPU, and even ROG options to turn motherboard lighting on and off.

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The Monitor tab is split up into four different pages for voltage monitoring, temperature monitoring, fan speed monitoring, and a page to configure the fans.

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The Boot tab has more than just your boot order, here you can also get into details on the Impacts boot process including turning fast boots on and off and also turning on or off the boot logo.

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I really like the took page that Asus put together. Here we can get into things like the Asus overclocking profiles where you can save and load multiple overclock profiles. This is always great when you have a stable build and are working on pushing the limits. They also slipped in a secure erase option as well as their EZ Flash 2 Utility that makes updating the bios easy. You can even get to the fan profile tuning and also an automatic overclocking utility here.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35904 25 Nov 2014 06:29
Before Thanksgiving week gets in full swing I take a look at Asus's top of the line Mini-ITX Z97 motherboard. This is one of a few reviews of components going in a new project LAN build. Check it out!
Myndmelt's Avatar
Myndmelt replied the topic: #35905 26 Nov 2014 04:39
Wow it looks like they have changed very little since the Maximus VI Impact which is what I have in my LAN box. The software and bios look more advanced. Also I really like the way that red hyperx looks on that board.
garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35907 26 Nov 2014 05:16
yeah this isn't a big change, just improvements on the original design along with the new Z97 chipset that is also only a small change from Z87 lol

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