The P8Z68-V Pro BIOS

For my testing on the P8Z68-V Pro, ASUS wasn’t able to provide the final mass production BIOS before I had to leave for a trip so the images you see here might vary slightly from what you’ll see if you pick up this board, but most will remain the same.

ASUS continues to strive forward with their innovative UEFI BIOS implementation allows them to provide some improved functionality and display much improved imagery and information. On the basic view of the BIOS, you will see an easy to view clock, information on your current system setup, basic results for temperature and voltage along with system performance presets and the boot priority for any hard drives installed. Overall, many users will find this view the easiest to understand and get around.

Once you switch to the Advanced mode though you will see some more typical BIOS options for overclocking, settings and more. The menus are divided into sub-sections of AI Tweaker (overclocking), Advanced, Monitor, Boot and Tools.

This screen shows the primary options in the AI Tweaker that allow the user to adjust the base clock speeds, ratios for Turbo Boost settings, memory multiplier and more.

The P8Z68-V Pro allows to you adjust the ratio on the Turbo multipliers on a per-core basis or all at once. The benefit of setting this to adjust all together is that you can then adjust them in software in Windows.

DDR3 memory speeds can be adjusted to any number of multipliers based on the base clock rate.

Memory timing adjustments are plentiful and are likely more in-depth that most of us will ever use or need.

The CPU Power Management section includes option for tweaking the voltage and current going to the cores during Turbo Mode which can help users get the absolute limit of the overclocking capability out their CPU.

More voltage controls are found in the AI Tweaker section and allow individual control of the CPU voltage by either an offset or a direct input. Voltages for the memory, chipset and PLL are also included here with some additional ones for more detailed overclockers.

The BIOS Advanced tab includes options for initiating the integrated or discrete graphics first and setting up how much primary memory the processor graphics is able to use from main system memory. When we discuss the Lucid Virtu setup you will see that the GPU option we set to the “initial” will help us determine which graphics card we attach our primary monitor to.

There are a ton of features on the P8Z68-V Pro motherboard and they can all be controlled here.

The Monitor section of the BIOS includes the ability to check on your voltages, temperatures, fan speeds and to set limits and options for those fan speeds.

Here you can set the boot options for your system and also which version of the UEFI BIOS that will load when you hit the delete key.

Overall, the impression from the ASUS BIOS is one of a highly improved user interface with options that more or less properly explained and detailed to a point where the average user can finally dive in and at least not feel completely overwhelmed. There are still some motherboards (like those from Intel) that give us more descriptions and are a bit easier to understand for the western audience, but the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro is impressive on all fronts.

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