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Firmware
The BIOS on this board is a throwback to the pre-UEFI days. In fact, I couldn’t figure out how to take screenshots from within. Instead, I had to take screencaps like it was the early 2000s. Still, it looks familiar for those who have used modern Asus BIOS, and everything is there, even if it doesn’t look as good as other UEFI modern BIOSes.
Software
Usually, we’d discuss the Armory Crate or Ai Suite here, but this CSM board has the Asus Control Center Express instead, which helps IT managers manage their systems with these motherboards.
Test System / Comparison Products
We’ve updated our test system to Windows 11 64-bit OS with all updates applied as of mid-October 2023. We kept the same Asus TUF RTX 3070 video card from our previous testing platforms but have updated the driver to the latest, keeping our games, F1 22 and Far Cry 6, the same. Unless otherwise noted, we use the latest non-beta motherboard BIOS available to the public using ‘optimized default’ settings except for the memory (XMP). The hardware and drivers we used are as follows:
Test System Components
| CPU | Intel Core i9-14900K |
| Memory | Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-6000 CL36 (KF560C36BBEAK2-32) |
| Row 2 - Cell 0 | Teamgroup T-Force Delta RGB DDR5- 7200 CL34 (FF3D516G7200HC34ABK) |
| Row 3 - Cell 0 | Klevv CRAS XR5 RGB (KD5AGUA80-80R380S) |
| GPU | Asus TUF RTX 3070 |
| Cooling | Coolermaster MasterLiquid PL360 Flux |
| PSU | EVGA Supernova 850W P6 |
| Software | Windows 11 64-bit (22H2) |
| Graphics | NVIDIA Driver 537.42 |
Benchmark Settings
| SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS AND SETTINGS | Row 0 - Cell 1 |
| Procyon | Version 2.6.848 64 |
| Row 2 - Cell 0 | Office Suite (Office 365), Video Editing (Premiere Pro 23.6), Photo Editing (Photoshop 25.0, Lightroom Classic 12.5) |
| 3DMark | Version 2.27.8177 64 |
| Row 4 - Cell 0 | Firestrike Extreme (v1.1) and Time Spy (v1.2) Default Presets |
| Cinebench R24 | Version ‘build unknown’ |
| Row 6 - Cell 0 | Open GL Benchmark - Single and Multi-threaded |
| Blender | Version 3.6.0 |
| Row 8 - Cell 0 | Full benchmark (all 3 tests) |
| APPLICATION TESTS AND SETTINGS | Row 9 - Cell 1 |
| LAME MP3 | Version SSE2_2019 |
| Row 11 - Cell 0 | Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160Kb/s) |
| HandBrake CLI | Version: 1.2.2 |
| Row 13 - Cell 0 | Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19GB 4K mkv to x264 (light AVX) and x265 (heavy AVX) |
| Corona 1.4 | Version 1.4 |
| Row 15 - Cell 0 | Custom benchmark |
| 7-Zip | Version 21.03-beta |
| Row 17 - Cell 0 | Integrated benchmark (Command Line) |
| GAME TESTS AND SETTINGS | Row 18 - Cell 1 |
| Far Cry 6 | Ultra Preset - 1920 x 1080, HD Textures ON |
| F1 2022 | Ultra Preset - 1920 x 1080, Ultra High (default) Bahrain (Clear/Dry), FPS Counter ON |
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