Z87 UEFI BIOS Continued

Overclockers will gravitate to the AI Tweaker section. It’s here that you’ll be able to adjust every CPU, memory, and power setting you’ve ever heard of, and frankly a lot of settings you haven’t heard of!

The main Tweaker page serves as a stepping-off point for the individual sections on the CPU, DRAM, and power adjustments. There are a few general settings at the bottom.

The CPU section has the usual suspects, but bear in mind that what you see on this screen will vary depending on the CPU installed in the system. You won’t be able to adjust the CPU Core Ratio, CPU Strap, or some other settings with non-“K” series CPUs.

I was going to count how many settings you could change on the AI Tweaker DRAM Timing Control page, but I lost count after 20. OK, actually I counted twice and got 33 different DRAM settings, including interesting ones like Scrambler Setting. I’m told that setting this to “Optimized” will improve stability.

Of course, if you’re overclocking, you’re going to need to work with the power settings too. ASUS was one of the first (if not the first) vendor to adopt fully digital power supplies on board with their Digi+ design, and experienced overclockers will be able to make good use of all the capabilities available.

Another cool BIOS feature ASUS introduced on their Z87 line is the concept of a Favorites section. At almost any point in the BIOS, you can press F4 and add that specific setting to the My Favorites page. This makes accessing your frequently-used settings much easier. Here I’ve added CPU Core Ration, CPU Core Voltage, and CPU Q-Fan Control to my Favorites page for easy access.

This last item is one of my favorite features: a list of all the settings you’ve changed, before you have to commit to saving them. Ingenious.

I’ll examine ASUS’ new version of AI Suite in the next section.