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The UEFI

After testing quite a number boards, this will be my first look at Asus’ version of a UEFI. I took a full set of screen shots, then promptly lost my thumb drive. I didn’t realize this until I’d started on another board, so I had to remount this one. In so doing, I actually discovered something really bad, but really useful. So, starting out with a new set, by default we get the EZ mode screen.

We did not use SATA6G_1 because that port shares bandwidth with the M.2 slot if it is populated. There’s nothing remarkable here, except for that CPU temperature. That’s going to get worse, but you're going to find out there’s a reason for that.

Advanced mode presents subcategories, which we’ll see momentarily.

Here we see the default settings, which don’t look unusual. There goes that CPU temperature. . .

Here, we’ve turned on XMP. The board would not boot with XMP active, and it had nothing to do with that alarming CPU temperature. We did skip further manual efforts, like trying to adjust RAM voltage.

This looks fairly conventional; not very different with what we’ve seen elsewhere. That CPU temperature though; the fan is running and not screaming either.

As usual, NumLock had to be turned off (unless you’re someone who uses it -ed). We also think we’ve let that CPU get hot enough; and all we're doing is taking BIOS screen shots! Time to find out what’s going on. The CPU fan is running, and it's still not exceptionally loudly.

When we remounted this board just to get these screen shots, we picked up a cheap Intel S1151 HSF off a shelf rather than remount the big Noctua heat sink we use for our tests. When we took that HSF off, we discovered that the TIM had not spread. Although it was properly clicked into place, apparently something about the socket prevented the HSF from sitting snugly on the CPU. There was but a tiny sliver of paste on the CPU. The socket is standard; we're not blaming the board for this, but the stock Intel HSF (admittedly for a lesser CPU, but the fit should be identical) appears to be unfit for purpose. It would no doubt manifest the same issue on a locked i3 or Pentium. Whether or not you have seen this would be useful information in the comments, please.

Ok, on to performance. Let’s see if this one is notably different in any way from its peers.

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