We often find that ASUS motherboards, despite their massive success within this industry, fall a little short of the mark in their layout and simplicity of use. One thing that particularly gets under my skin is their reluctance to use the term “XMP”. Setting up your DRAM kit is something that almost everyone that reads this review will have done several times across multiple generations of PCs, perhaps even helped a friend or family member with it. If you purchase a, let’s say, DDR4-3000MHz kit and never enable XMP, you’re theoretically wasting almost a third of your performance by leaving it at 2133MHz.
ASUS seem set in their ways at keeping their D.O.C.P. (Direct Over Clock Profile) instead of naming it XMP. If you use the search function for “XMP”, you can’t find it, so if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, this is going to be a frustrating exercise.
Anyway, when you first boot into the BIOS you’re given the basic overview page, this shows you RAM speeds, connected drives, voltage and temperature information as well as some low-level fan curve adjustment. You’ll see highlighted in the middle-left that we’ve selected the XMP setting for our CORSAIR memory kit.
Hitting F7 transports you into an advanced section of the BIOS, here settings can be tweaked much further. The Main page gives you a list of information relating to the system with frequencies and voltage always listed on the right-hand-side.
ASUS call their overclocking section the AI Tweaker, this can be left to Auto so the motherboard, along with the engineers’ knowhow, can be put to work to extract as much performance as possible from your CPU or you can delve in and set things up to your own liking. We find that with the 3rd Gen. Ryzen processors that they’re pretty much turned all the way up to 11 anyway so we leave things as they are.
Last up there’s a set of ASUS tools that you can set to work. Updating your BIOS version is usually a good starting step if you’re getting any funny issues with your system, but there’s utilities to erase HDDs/SSDs, read SPD info from your RAM kit and give information on your GPU, amongst others.
All things considered, the BIOS isn’t the worst but we feel it lacks behind the likes of MSI and Gigabyte Aorus.
ASUS seem set in their ways at keeping their D.O.C.P. (Direct Over Clock Profile) instead of naming it XMP. If you use the search function for “XMP”, you can’t find it, so if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, this is going to be a frustrating exercise.
Anyway, when you first boot into the BIOS you’re given the basic overview page, this shows you RAM speeds, connected drives, voltage and temperature information as well as some low-level fan curve adjustment. You’ll see highlighted in the middle-left that we’ve selected the XMP setting for our CORSAIR memory kit.
Hitting F7 transports you into an advanced section of the BIOS, here settings can be tweaked much further. The Main page gives you a list of information relating to the system with frequencies and voltage always listed on the right-hand-side.
ASUS call their overclocking section the AI Tweaker, this can be left to Auto so the motherboard, along with the engineers’ knowhow, can be put to work to extract as much performance as possible from your CPU or you can delve in and set things up to your own liking. We find that with the 3rd Gen. Ryzen processors that they’re pretty much turned all the way up to 11 anyway so we leave things as they are.
Last up there’s a set of ASUS tools that you can set to work. Updating your BIOS version is usually a good starting step if you’re getting any funny issues with your system, but there’s utilities to erase HDDs/SSDs, read SPD info from your RAM kit and give information on your GPU, amongst others.
All things considered, the BIOS isn’t the worst but we feel it lacks behind the likes of MSI and Gigabyte Aorus.
