BIOS Overview

We have something of a new EFI for ASUS with the ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial, albeit most of the changes are in the color scheme to match the motherboard itself, which is a nice touch. The EzMode page does its usual thing of giving you easy access to the essentials such as memory profiles or EXPO, boot priority and quick access to fan control, search and several other options, some of which are available in a new Quick Settings bar. Q-Dashboard is still here, which allows you to view currently connected hardware, and clicking on many items will take you through to that item's page in the EFI.

The standard advanced mode now also includes a scrollable hardware monitor, although this does impede the view of the main menu system a bit. We also get a new Essential Mode that's pretty useful as it combines EzMode with a few more select options from the overclocking section. The search function shouldn't be overlooked, though, as it does a good job of finding things and unlike some of the competition, you can actually change options within the search box too. There's also a favorites page that allows you to handpick options you use regularly and is pre-populated with an overclocking-focussed set of options out of the box that are customizable.

Extreme Tweaker is where you'll find PBO and overclocking controls as well as memory timings, although PBO options are also found under the advanced menu in AMD Overclocking, which we'll get to later. The fan control section also looks different, but the same options are here including the new option here of the optional memory fan, which can be fully adjusted.

Annoyingly, whatever tweaks ASUS has made to the EFI also prevented us from taking screen grabs with menu drop-downs shown, but you get the pick of VRMs, DIMM.2 module, DIMM and chipset for fan control options in addition to the usual ones such as CPU. Thanks to the 64 MB BIOS, you can now load the Wi-Fi driver directly from the motherboard without needing to download it, but you can manually turn this off on the Tool page.