ASUS Motherboard UEFI BIOS

ASUS has always had the best-designed UEFI BIOSes, in my opinion. They’ve upped their game with the release of their Z87 lineup, and even tweaked the color scheme.

The default BIOS page layout has been updated to show CPU, DRAM, and fan settings across the top. The middle area, with its system performance settings, and the lower area, with the attached disks the user can drag into preferred boot order, remain the same. But this isn’t just a status screen: you can enable the memory’s XMP profile (if there is one), change fan profiles, change the order of boot devices, and make broad changes to the system’s power/performance ratio.

Pressing F7 or clicking the Advanced Mode button at the top right of the main screen switches the BIOS to advanced mode. This is where most enthusiasts will prefer to spend their time. Advanced Mode opens up options like the AI Tweaker overclocking controls, and the Advanced section (yes, there’s an Advanced section in Advanced mode) opens up detailed settings for everything from CPU, Memory, SATA ports, USB (as shown above) and more.

The CPU Configuration section displays the specifications of the processor, as well as allowing you to enable or disabled a variety of CPU features.

The SATA Configuration section now has a setting for Link Power Management (Aggressive LPM Support). You can save power by having unused SATA devices power down, but this adds a small wait when the devices are needed as they must be powered up and brought back online. You can also change the default device names to more descriptive names as shown above.

The Advanced section is also where you control the various onboard devices like sound, WiFi, Bluetooth, and the extra Asmedia-hosted USB 3.0 ports.

There’s more BIOS goodness in the next section.