NZXT N7 Z690 Motherboard Review

BIOS Overview

The Basic Input/Output System, or “BIOS” has many features and options that can be user-defined and altered to suit what you want to use the PC for, this includes basic settings like fan control and more advanced settings like overclocking. The majority of features in a BIOS will be the same from one board to another but how they work and how to use them can differ, so we’ll be looking at the bios to see specifics for this board so you know better how to use the BIOS if you find yourself with your hands on this board.

EZ Mode

EZ Mode is as its name describes, easy. It compresses everything into basic and easy to understand information with all of the controls being one or the other style options, you don’t get any more options than on or off and in the fan of fan control you can only change if it’s a fan or pump, opening the settings for the fans from within the EZ Mode will open the Hardware Monitor tab that we look at in greater detail a little later in the BIOS overview.

The EZ mode of the BIOS has a decent collection of options, you can set XMP profiles here as well as change boot priority, but instead of fan profiles, there is a simple option to cycle through cooler types.

Advanced Mode

The main page of the advanced mode is very basic, all you get from this is some system hardware information that I’d hope you already knew if you built the system. This page could easily be useful though, if memory is causing a problem, and you can easily check here if it’s being detected or not.

The advanced page has multiple sub-pages that contain the relevant options and settings to tweak for settings such as above 4G decoding and Re-sizable bar.

The tools page is pretty baren but does contain the incredibly useful option for flashing the BIOS, which can improve the compatibility and stability of the board.

The security tab is what you would expect it to be, with options for Secure boot or setting a password for the BIOS.

The boot menu allows us to change boot priority and enable fast boot, among other things including booting from LAN.

The final page of the BIOS is the exit page, who would have guessed. From here we can choose to either save or discard changes and load default settings.

Overclocking

The overclocking page features four sub-pages that contain the options to adjust frequencies and voltages on specific components. This is where you would want to go if you wanted to adjust the frequency of your CPU or memory.

When we scroll down the overclocking page we will find a total of ten profiles that you can set and apply easily.

PC Monitoring

The top part of the PC monitoring page gives you information on temperatures and fan speeds as well as a live look at power usage.

When we scroll down a little bit we can find the bulk of this page; this gives us the option to change fan curves and profiles on an individual basis based on the header.