ASUS have taken advantage of EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS with the release of the new Sandy Bridge motherboards. For those who have had no experience with this BIOS interface, it is a radical step away from the conventional BIOS that we have come to use since computing really began. With EFI we can now point and click with the mouse, drag and drop, and instead of having a DOS type interface with just plain background colour and white text to scroll using the keyboard, we now have a flashy GUI that responds in a totally different manner to its aged predecessor.

Inside the ASUS EFI BIOS there are lots of features, some of which will differ to other boards that incorporate EFI. The Maximus IV Extreme has a plethora of customisable options, clearly this is a board that will satisfy novice enthusiasts all the way up to the extreme user. To take these screenshots I was even able to ‘print screen‘ by hitting F12. This saved a snapshot of the BIOS screen I was on to a USB stick – just one of the many advantages of using EFI.