BIOS Walkthrough

ASUS has designed one of my most favorite BIOSes for the ROG series, a design that offers more than any normal user is ever going to need, and just enough to make even extreme clocking easy, something that no other OEM offers at this point. Upon booting the board and entering the BIOS we are greeted by a flashy "Easy" page, one that in my opinion is a bit too busy to really be easy to use. All of those options there are shown in the first image above, and as you can see, it does hold a lot of stuff there. Fortunately, a more traditional layout is also available, accessed by clicking the button in the top right of the main page, and selecting "Advanced Mode". Once in the "Advanced Mode", we end up on the main settings page with access to almost every needed option for overclocking and memory setup.


There are so many options here that it took three screenshots to be able to show them all, a testament to ASUS's commitment to provide the most options to the end user in their ROG products. After the tweaking section we find a more traditional main page with language, date and time options, and then the third page lists board-specific options, all tied together.


WIth the BIOS offering an easy way to capture screenshots to a FAT-formatted device, it was quite easy for me to capture every single page and post them here.


Every option you could ever need is contained here, as well as a few that aren't required, but are definitely nice to have.


ASUS has spent considerable time optimizing the layout, with each page containing very specific options without being confusing at all, as each option not only contains obvious labelling, but also has a nice little description listed on the right-most side of the screen.


Even the monitoring section is laid out neatly, with seperate pages for voltages, temperatures, fan speeds, and finally, fan controls. The first of a few things I think is missing here on the ASUS Maximus V Gene is on the voltage monitoring page, as there is no listing for iGPU voltage, which might be a nice addition.


The temperature page is pretty sparce as well, with just CPU and PCH temperatures listed, and that is all. Fan speed monitoring, on the other hand, has listings for each fan individually. The controls for the fans are seperate to nearly every fan as well, with only the dual CPU_FAN headers grouped together, which does make a lot of sense. The fact that a second CPU_FAN header is even offered, great for users with dual-fan CPU coolers, is amazing in and of itself.


The Boot page is pretty basic, but does include a section to boot from other drives other than the primary listed. After that though, is the tools page, something I personally like A LOT. First is the tool "EZ-Flash", for BIOS updates from within the BIOS, then we have the O.C. Profile listing, for saving BIOS profiles that can be loaded very easily.


The third tool is immensely useful, the SPD Tool, which displays both stock JEDEC and XMP profiles for your installed DIMMs, making manual adjustment of timings a very easy task, although a bit of knowledge is required as the options listed in BIOS for memory timings do not have the exact same labels as the SPD Tool does. The final listing in the Tools section is access to the "GO Button" profile, which can instantly load a profile for overclocking, even when the system is running.


The final page I've posted here is accessable at any time, by pressing "F3". The pictured menu will pop up, allowing quick navigation to any main section of the BIOS, something I used a fair bit when setting things up for the first time. All that said, I do have to commend ASUS here for having the very best and most functional UEFI BIOS in the industry, offering a ton of options that no other OEM currently matches. These options included a whole bunch of memory profiles for easy memory clocking, as well as other features designed to cater specifically to extreme clocking users, making this the best BIOS for every-day users and extreme users alike. It can be very hard to manage the two very different needs of those types of users, but ASUS manages it all very well, while not sacrificing stability to do so. That's a gargantuan task, so hat's off to ASUS, for a job very very well done.