BIOS
With the new Z97 chipset comes a new ASUS UEFI BIOS design, it is great to see ASUS going back to the drawing board and bringing in some new features because everyone likes positive change. New additions of note compared to Z87 are the interactive fan curves and the EZ Tuning Wizard. The new fan curves in the BIOS essentially bring Fan Xpert III functionality from the Windows environment into the UEFI arena while the EZ Tuning Wizard has been updated to account for cooling and what kind of performance the user wants. Feel free to have a good look around the UEFI BIOS pictures below and see what you think. All in all the ASUS UEFI demonstrates its usual flexibility towards both “basic” users and “advanced” users with a wide range of options that you can play with, or just leave on auto. Either way the choice is yours and that’s what is so important here. I think what’s also worth pointing out is that this BIOS is identical to the ones found on larger Z97 motherboards – just because this is a mini-ITX motherboards it doesn’t mean any compromises have been made with functionality which is great.
