BIOS
We used to get lots of pictures to show some of the BIOS functionality but I’ve found that it is a lot easier just to have a video clicking through all of the options where you can pause and check anything out. Even though all of the orange accents have vanished from the board itself, the BIOS on the Aorus Master was still decked out in orange. While it does have an easy mode and an advanced mode it dropped me right into the advanced section, in the overclock settings in fact which does save time but seems to defeat the point of having an easy mode to protect people who don’t know what they are doing from getting into options that can do some damage. You can see the easy mode al the way at the end of the video but it gives you a look at clock speeds and temperatures up top and the status of your ram slots. You can drag and drop your boot devices to get the order correct and see any fan that is hooked up as well. They also let you turn on XMP for your memory which is nice.
Back in the advanced mode, the Tweaker page is where Gigabyte has put all of their overclocking options. Up at the top you can jump right in with CPU clock speeds as well as the option to turn Enhanced Multi-Core Performance on or off which is MCE and auto overclocks your CPU. It comes set to auto but I test with it turned off to see stock Intel performance. The advanced CPU options menu gets you all of the more detailed options including full menus for adjusting turbo ratios, c-states, power limits, and hyperthreading settings. Back in the Tweakers menu below the CPU options are the memory overclocking settings and they are in a similar layout with the XMP at the top, manual adjustment of the clock speed, and then in the advanced settings you can get into changing timing manually and other settings. Also on the Tweaker page down at the bottom are all of the voltage settings for both CPU and memory.
The Settings tab is the next one and it is relatively simple at first when you only see five options but each is its own menu. The power settings cover wake options which I feel like should be in the boot menu. The I/O menu gets into all of the chipset features and controllers like the onboard LAN, USB options, NVMe configuration, and SATA. Anything not covered in there is just tossed into the miscellaneous option. This has options like how onboard LEDs are handled and the now extremely old 3DMark01 enhancement option. The Settings menu also has a PC Heath page which just lists off all of the current voltages and if the case is open or not. I was surprised this didn’t have more fan speeds and temperatures. Then there is Smart Fan 5 which does have those readouts as well as options to control how your fans act. You can set fan profiles and even more important you can decide what temperature sensors they should go off of.
The next tab is the System Info tab and this has all of the information you normally get on the home page like the model and BIOS revision, CPUJ, and system date and time. You can also get to Q-Flash here which is what you use to update the BIOS but that option, as well as Smart Fan 5, are on the bottom of every page as well. Then the last tab is the boot tab which has the main startup options like boot device priority, fast boot options, setting a boot password, and so on. All together the Aorus Masters BIOS was easy to navigate though I will say given its price I thought we might see even more overclocking options. All of the basics are there and that is all I would need, but higher-end boards sometimes get crazy with the level of detail you can get in and change but most of that wasn’t there.
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