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. I booted into the advanced mode right out of the hole. I’ve talked a lot about this in the past but Asus and a lot of other companies provide the EzMode to protect inexperienced users from having access to anything that could cause damage but then most of the time on my first boot I boot into the advanced mode bypassing it all. The landing page is your favorites page, you can add things to this for a quick jump in to change things. By default memory frequency is on here, as our voltages and a few boot options. Over on the right side, you have a hardware monitor with frequencies, temps, and voltages for the memory and CPU. This shows up on all pages.

The main tab up top gets you the BIOS version information as well as some basic info on your system like memory capacity and CPU. You can also change the date and time or language here. From there the next tab up top is the Ai Tweaker tab. This is the overclocking area here you can get access to all of the voltage and timing settings. As you dive into the details you have a LOT of control here, especially with your memory and power control.

The Advanced tab is the next section and this one is basically where you will find any other board, chipset, or peripheral setting that isn’t a normal overclocking setting. You can see that every subsystem is here like SATA, PCI settings, NIC, USB, and so on. The most important one is the AMD CBS down at the bottom and I forgot to click it. I missed it because it didn’t have an arrow indicating it was another page for some reason. But that is where you will get into the X470 chipset settings including some of the CPU settings needed to control turbo speeds.

The monitor tab basically lists out every sensor readout for all of your fans and temperature sensors onboard. Down at the bottom, you can also dive into the Q-Fan config. This lets you setup how fan profiles will act, turn on pump headers, and also run the configuration. There is a second place to get to Q-Fan controls up along the top or with F6, this is where you can map out fan cooling profiles. The Boot tab is the last normal tab and this is where all of your boot options are. Things like fast boot are here as well as configuring what your boot order and boot devices are.

The Tool tab is something a little different. These aren’t settings but rather additional software programs you can run right in the BIOS. The EZ Flash 3 Utility, for example, doesn’t show you how to flash yourself in public, no it lets you update the BIOS from right inside of the BIOS. It even lets you access the file from an already installed hard drive for simple downloading in windows then updating without a flash drive. Secure Erase is for doing low-level drive wipes, you know, in case you were mistaken on the EZ Flash before and took photos. Overclocking profiles are here, basically, you can save multiple profiles with different levels of overclocks for different room temps or to backup new profiles you are testing. The other two options basically just let you see in more detail what hardware you are running.

Up along the top, there are a few other options. For example, you can turn all Aura lighting on and off quickly. There is the Q-Fan Control that I already talked about. Then there is EZ Tuning Wizard. Asus brings out a wizard with his awesome hat and does magic, okay maybe they don’t go that far. But it does let you select a few basic things like what you use your PC for and what cooling you have and does a basic overclock for you. With the gaming setting, what I found for our 2700X was an estimated 2% with a factory box cooler, 5% with a tower air cooler, and 8% with water cooling using the wizard. The result was the same using daily computing as well. Not bad for almost no effort.

Lastly, I did jump into the EZ Mode to show everyone what it looks like. Basically, everything is on one page and there aren’t many drop down options. In fact, the only one is to turn on the DOCP aka AMDs version of XMP. You can see what you have for hardware in the top left, what fans are hooked up and how fast they are running, your fan profile, and even temps and voltages. Then boot order is drag and drop as this is the main thing inexperienced users might be looking for.

 

Log in to comment

VaporX's Avatar
VaporX replied the topic: #38525 26 May 2018 00:09
I am debating this board and the Prime X470 Pro, save a little money. The plan is to run a 2600X at stock settings, let the built in overclock do it job.

We have 1747 guests and no members online

supportus