BIOS and Overclocking
The BIOS on this motherboard is extremely complex and could even worry the most skilled user if you try to navigate too quickly.
Sadly, SuperMicro and all the wisdom of the manufacturing team decided a snapshot button wasn’t needed for the BIOS; great! Please excuse the early 2000’s version of screen grabbing, but it was the only way. Overall, the BIOS is a clean and simple design, this could be to enable maximum functionality within the BIOS and the settings itself.
This is the CPU overclocking screen, this is only around a third of the options available.
Just navigating this maze was such a taxing process. Convention would suggest that pressing enter and escape would allow you to enter and leave categories and the arrow keys to move around, nope! For some reason, the escape key doesn’t work and you have to keep tapping the left arrow to cycle the entire settings list before you can get to the top (in my experience anyway).
Overclocking
The BIOS features are so extensive that trying to overclock the CPU was an absolute nightmare. The BIOS needs a lot more work to become user-friendly on a mass scale. The CPU managed to maintain the 4.8GHz overclock with a 1.5v power setting.
Eh? ‘Overclockers Dream’ award but you said, “The BIOS features are so extensive that trying to overclock the CPU was an absolute nightmare. The BIOS needs a lot more work to become user-friendly on a mass scale”. Doesn’t make sense to me…
However the performance was surprisingly very good! Perhaps a ‘Performance’ award of some kind would have been better suited.
I bought it. It takes 12 seconds to load the bios logo and 28 seconds in total to show the windows 10 login. Performance?!