The BIOS
When you first enter the P8Z77-V PRO’s BIOS, you’re presented with a simple overview screen, which gives you the ability to change everything you should need to if you’re a configure-and-forget type of consumer. It gives you the ability to change your boot order, and also select one of three performance presets.
Pressing F7 on the initial screen will take you to the BIOS’ Advanced Mode. Initially you’re presented with a more in-depth overview page, which provides you with BIOS details, CPU information, memory specification and simple system configuration options such as date/time and security settings. Pressing F3 at any time will present you with a table of contents to the UEFI, if you’re having trouble locating anything.
Moving to the Ai Tweaker pane, you’re presented with a plethora of options for overclocking, voltages, RAM timings and speeds, and a special feature called OC tuner, which will be covered more later. ASUS lets you configure your CPU and memory overclock with three settings; Auto, Manual, and X.M.P.
In the Advanced pane the option to configure complex settings of your installed components is readily available. For example, in the Advanced CPU settings pane, you’re able to enable or disable some of your CPU cores, disable thermal throttling, and more.
Following on from the Advanced pane is a hardware monitor tab, aptly named Monitor. Here you will see motherboard and CPU temperature, fan speeds (including in-depth settings thanks to the excellent Fan XPert 2 technology), CPU VCore voltage, and a reading of your power supplies 3.3v, 5v, and 12v rails.
The penultimate tab is an advanced boot screen, allowing you to customize your boot order, but also override the boot order for a one-time boot from a different device or drive. This can be exceptionally useful if you want to install Windows from a USB for example, and then boot from the hard disk the next time you boot your machine.
Finally, ASUS have given you 3 additional tools to assist you with your usage of the board; EZ Flash 2, which allows you to update the BIOS from within it – often considered a safer method than using Windows software to do so, ASUS O.C. Profile, which allows you to save profiles based on your BIOS settings for quick switches between your pre-configured settings, and lastly SPD Information, which gives you information on manufacturer, module size, and JEDEC/XMP timing data for your memory.
The ASUS UEFI BIOS is all in all very responsive with very little delay between panes or submenus. I had no issue getting my USB keyboard and mouse to function adequately in the BIOS, and the settings on offer should cover almost anyone into overclocking or performance tweaking their hardware.