BIOS Features
EVGA redesigned their BIOS interface for the Z87 board series with the newest revision of their UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS. The UEFI BIOS offers full keyboard and mouse support while using the BIOS pages with enhanced mouse navigation supported by right clicking the mouse – goes back to previous view if inside a settings pop-up or on a sub-menu page. EVGA also includes their screen capture utility. Clicking the F12 function key generates a 1024×768 bitmap image on an attached USB drive.
The EVGA UEFI BIOS included with the Z87 Stinger is a nice design, sleek in appearance and intuitive to use if your even just passingly familiar with a BIOS interface. However, one major hole in the BIOS is the inability to update the CMOS from within the interface. For whatever reason, EVGA decided to leave this functionality out of their UEFI BIOS implementation. One other oddity was the inability to capture the popup Load Profile and Save Profile screens using in-built F12 screen capture functionality in the BIOS.
BIOS Notable Features
Overclock tab
EVGA's UEFI BIOS is a sleek and simple to use interface logically oriented in a tab-like motif. They organized the BIOS settings across five tabs – Overclock, memory, Advanced, Boot, and Save & Exit. Above the tabbed settings interface, their include real-time statistics on key settings such as memory size and speed, CPU voltage, memory voltage, CPU ratio and Base Clock speed, CPU speed, HyperThreading status, number of active CPU cores, PCI-Express bus port bandwidth, VRM temperature, and CPU temperature. These statistics are presented in a mixed graphical/text display with graphical representations of the memory bus and PCI-Express bus presented.
Save & Exit tab
The Save & Exit page houses a few notable features including a boot override section and BIOS profile load and save capabilities. Through this screen, you can generate up to eight total profiles for storage of all BIOS settings at the time of profile generation or save.
BIOS Walkthrough – Overlocking Settings
Overclock tab
Overclock tab, voltage settings
Overclock tab, CPU Configuration page
Overclock tab, CPU Configuration page continued
Overclock tab, BCLK Configuration page
Memory tab
Memory tab, Second Memory Timing Configuration settings
Memory tab, Third Memory Timing Configuration settings
Memory tab, Third Memory Timing Configuration settings continued
Memory tab, Memory Training Algorithm Setting page
Memory tab, Memory Training Algorithm Setting page continued
Memory tab, Memory Debug Setting page
How was the onboard sound?
How was the onboard sound? Did you notice anything good or bad with SB integrated?
No audio testing was done in
No audio testing was done in the base review unfortunately…