BIOS

For the UEFI or BIOS, rather than putting together a bunch of screenshots that would be hard to flip through and would still miss a lot of the features I have done a quick walkthrough video showing every menu. The first thing I noticed when getting into the BIOS is that Asus has taken us right into the advanced menu. They are normally good about starting you off in EZ Mode to prevent anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing getting into stuff they don’t know. In this case, the Apex is a little more of a high-end board and I think they expect the users to be overclocking so you land right on the extreme tweaker page. This has your target clock speeds up top and you have access to every detail and believe me if you can think of it the Apex has it.

A good portion of the rest of the BIOS options can really be found under the advanced tab where you get taken to a page of links to other pages. This is where peripheral and chipset features unrelated to overclocking are all hidden. The rest of the menu tabs explain themselves really. Monitor gets you a long page with every sensor readout, the boot tab has boot options, and the exit menu is where you finish up and exit and potentially save changes. The tool page is the only other one with anything really important. Here you can update the BIOS with a download or by reading all connected devices including hard drives for the update file. In other words, if you download and forget to put it on a flash drive it is okay, you can find your download folder here and run the update. You also have access to the overclock profiles to save multiple configurations

Up top, you can get the EZ Tuning Wizard to let the motherboard do a basic overclock for you or you can get into the QFan Control and map out your fan profiles. Speaking of, in the advanced options I also found that you can also change every one of the Apex’s fan headers to depend on different temperatures. So a CPU header would be set to the CPU temp but a fan header for a front mounted fan might be better servers on VRMs or any other sensor if you have a specific hotzone to take care of. Now the EZ mode is there down on the bottom and in there you can turn on a few settings like XMP and drag and drop boot options if you are being lazy.

As always Asus’s BIOS are solid and the Apex is no different. Mouse controls feel a little off (sometimes the mouse tracks like I'm picking the mouse up when I'm not), something that Asus normally doesn’t have an issue with but their competitors do. It is still better than the rest but I’m hoping Asus picks up on the issue and gets it worked out. The number of features and total control that they give you though makes up for the issue and is still above anything else on the market other than past Asus boards.

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