BIOS

As always, rather than trying to capture everything with photos I’ve gone through all of the BIOS options one by one and put it all together on video. It is a basic video with no voice over just for me to talk about a little here. So I booted right into the advanced mode, this is always a frustration for me. The whole point of an Easy Mode is to drop inexperienced users there first for simple adjustments. In advanced mode, you cant even see the option for getting to Easy Mode unless you mouse over the bottom. But you can see overclocking options on the MIT tab. This is great for most of us because it makes for quick overclocking, but someone who is inexperienced might mess things up.

So the MIT tab, like I said is all overclocking focused options. You first land on a menu that lets you pick from frequency overclocks, memory settings, voltages, PC Health, fan settings, and a miscellaneous tab with just a few basic options. This is where you are going to spend most of your time. The System tab next to this is what is normally the landing screen with a BIOS version and model name along with language and date settings.

The BIOS tab would be better named the boot tab. This is where you can set your booting options like boot priority, if things like LAN booting is turned on, etc. The Peripherals tab initially looks like it will just have trusted platform and NIC options but this is where you will find the AMD CBS options. This really should be in the MIT tab as this is where you get into the fine tuning of the Zen platform as a whole including how performance boost is handled. The FCH option has a lot of the chipset options like SATA and USB, it’s a shame all of these are buried as well. There are a few other SATA options in under Chipset like being able to see what drives are installed on each port and turning RAID on and off, but the FCH options should also have been in this area. The Power tab has a few more boot options as well as how to handle power loss.

I did also flip over to the Easy Mode to see what we missed out on. Everything is easy to read and available without any menus to go through. You can see temperatures and the CPU voltage. You have the option to turn on EZ OC modes as well as XMP memory profiles or drag and drop to change boot order on your hard drives.

Overall the BIOS for the Gaming 7 is PACKED with options but a lot of important options are hard to find. Some of the tabs could be combined and renamed and the Easy Mode was basically unused as well. Mouse movement went well so things have improved on that front.