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welcome to the third installment of the $1 100ish doll z97 motherboard Showdown

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this video got bumped back many times from CES to getting sick twice and the

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GTX 960 launch Etc but enough with

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excuses The Show Must Go On as with the previous two videos we will be exploring

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the world of affordable motherboards instead of top tier motherboards which

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are expensive and don't really impact

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performance we are doing this because we want to explore the pros and cons and

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trade-offs of boards people are actually

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buying in this video we will be covering the UEFI BIOS experience of each board

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things like USB drive uh peripherals RAM

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compatibility all that kind of stuff and other things just the usability of the

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motherboard also stay subscribed for part four where we will be covering the

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finished system experience and the final conclusion of this whole series

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cooler Masters case mod World Series is your opportunity to show off your

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modding skills and win great prizes entries Clos February 7th 2015 click now

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to learn more I was delightfully surprised when each board not only

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worked with every keyboard and mouse but also was able to post with XMP for each

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RAM kit what was expected and yet no

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less incredibly frustrating however was the issues that I encountered with flash

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drive compatibility there are a few things more frustrating than being stuck

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with a board that needs a ufi BIOS update no optical drive and a flash

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drive that won't detect but that being

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said this may not be that big of an issue as many of you probably have a few

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old flash drives laying around which tend to work a lot more often but

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whether it's during an update or something else what if your ufi BIOS

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gets corrupted how will you recover well luckily the Gigabyte board comes with

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dual UEFI BIOS support so can easily just switch from your corrupted one to a

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fresh new one uh in basically no time but also noteworthy is that the ASUS

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board and the ASRock board have swappable BIOS chips which may be a

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little annoying as you would need to contact a manufacturer for a replacement

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but at least it gives you the option of repairing your board while MSI includes

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no actual other safeguards now onto what

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I know a lot of you have been actually waiting for the actual usability of the

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UEFI BIOS but a few disclaimers must be

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made here first each one of these UEFI BIOS setups could have easily taken an

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entire video dedicated to them naturally

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I will be focusing on what makes each of these experiences unique Instead at

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their core they all provide the same general functionality you can review

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core system specs change your boot device set up a password for system boot

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Etc as there is virtually no difference in the overclocking capabilities due to

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Intel moving more and more things onto

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the chip every time this leaves ease of use quirks and standout features as the

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focus of this segment another important disclaimer is that many things that I

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talk about will be my opinion but for

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your convenience I will be including as much footage of each ufi BIOS as

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possible so you can come to your own conclusions we'll start with a Seuss the

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easy mode start page is amazing to be honest before writing this review I

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would always skip right over the easy mode and and go into Advance mode right

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away but once I actually looked at it it has almost everything an average user

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will need to access quickly system information RAM SATA configuration easy

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tuning boot priority and a boot menu for overriding boot order if you need to

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oneoff boot to something like say a flash drive XMP settings irst on or off

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and a dedicated fan control setting which includes four different profiles

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manual control which is fantastic in granularity of seeming 1% a pwm or DC

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switch and a quick view for what fans are plugged in and their current status

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along with various helpful keyboard shortcuts clearly labeled along the

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bottom moving on to advanced mode we have all the detailed fine-tuning

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options that you would expect out of an advanced mode and all of these options

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are under sensible headers along with a detailed hardware monitor nicely and

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permanently fixed on the right hand side the hot keys are no longer against the

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bottom like they were in Easy Mode but you you can find a handy list available

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in the top right hand corner which will lay them all out for you there's also a

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favorite section which you can add things to so if you know you're going to

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commonly be tweaking something you can add it there and there's also the nice

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additional functionality of an inbios notepad if you need to leave reminders

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for yourself for various future information also at any time you can

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check what has recently been changed which is great but even more helpful

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than that is the details of what has changed this visit which will pop up

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when you save an exit from your UEFI BIOS next up we have azrock azrock

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didn't have a quick start page but you can decide what page your UEFI will boot

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into and that's quite handy and there's

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a ufi guide wait what what the f is a

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ufi guide well at first I thought it was going to be essentially Microsoft's

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clippy but for ufi turns out I was wrong

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the guide basically gives you a tour of asrock's ufi and tries to tell you how

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things work for complete beginners it does contain some useful nuggets of

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information but the implementation could have been a lot better it starts with

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please remain seated and keep your hands away from the mouse and keyboard at all

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times and I think to a degree they were actually serious other than pressing

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escape to abort the guide doesn't have any real functionality no pause no

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forward or back nothing so let's just

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move on there's a favorite section on the main page it's a selectable button

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that you can file things under not its own page like some other implementations

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but to each their own and there's no real hotkey information list which I

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found a little annoying you can find

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hotkeys Associated by certain functions by highlighting them but that doesn't

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really help you unless you memorize them especially since so many different

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boards have different keys for different things other than F10 which is generally

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being save and exit one unexpected feature is their dehumidifier function

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that turns the computer on and spins the fan if it detects excessive humidity you

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can check out asrock's video about this here overall asrock's ufi layout feels a

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little outdated and unexceptional but that doesn't make it bad it gets the job

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done without a bunch of extra junk in the way and that might be exactly what

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you're looking for then we come to Gigabyte right off the top I have to say

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this UEFI is aesthetically great overall

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I'm happy to see that they included a startup guide which is essentially Quick

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Settings right when you enter the buyo although it could maybe do with some

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more useful selections considering system language system time security

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load defaults and exit are over half the

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buttons I think it would be more likely to get used if it had some more commonly

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accessed settings and additionally you still have to click through these in

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order to get to those settings anyways as they're just essentially large

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shortcuts which kind of defeats the purpose of having a quick screen in my

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my opinion but speaking of defeating the purpose and all that ranting aside you

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can choose what menu type you want to boot into by clicking on Startup options

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and changing the selected box now hold

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up wait a minute you might be wondering what is Smart tweak mode and if there's

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smart tweak mode what is classic Mode well before we went into startup options

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did you notice those little gray lines on the left and right hand side yeah

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those ones well they turn into arrows when you highlight them the left one

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puts you into smart tweak mode and the right arrow puts you into classic Mode

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classic Mode is pretty much exactly what you would expect it looks a little old

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or should I say classic everything is right about where you'd expect it to be

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there's no real surprises Frills or gimmicks but your hotkeys are nicely

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laid out along the right hand side along with any additional extra information

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about whatever you have currently selected it's nice enough but a little

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boring so what exactly is smart tweak

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mode smart tweak mode is essentially another skin for your ufi so yes there

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are two different skin options for your ufi BIOS and a quick options UI holy

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crap anyway smart tweak mode is the one I'd use it looks wonderfully modern and

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it runs at up to 1080p on supported monitors and has a cool high-res graphic

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in the background and nicely detailed status information wrapping around the

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outside of your settings menus for some weird reason that goes away when you

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select save an exit tab which is a little weird and your hotkey information

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is on an unnecessarily scrolling bar along the bottom which should really

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just stay put so you can actually read everything instead of waiting for it to

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come back around but aside from some minor weirdness everything seems to be

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fairly logically laid out with the major tabs being broken up into subtabs that

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mostly remove the need to scroll by making it so that nearly everything is

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above the fold which is a nice touch last but possibly not least we have MSI

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for whatever reason when I first booted into MSI's ufi BIOS I didn't realize

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that anything in the top Blue Ribbon was clickable it just looked like static

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information at first that you would change elsewhere in the ufi eventually I

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clued into the very obvious fact that you're able to interact with this area

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in order to change your boot order OC Genie and XMP settings quickly and

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easily which is a nice mix of adding a quick selection menu but also not adding

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additional clicks for a user that just wants to actually get to what they

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needed cuz they're more advanced moving on to the extremely large clickable

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buttons we find that the settings OC M

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Flash and OC profile areas are pretty standard Fair no surprises here but once

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you get to hardware monitor and board Explorer things get a little bit more

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interesting starting with hardware monitor you have manual control of all

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your fans including four different levels of control while you have them in

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smart fan mode and one level of control

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when they're not in smart fan mode you also have the options to set all of your

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fans to full speed set all of your fans to the default curve or cancel

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everything out board explore is a cool little tool that will allow you to see a

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graphical representation of what things are connected to your motherboard you

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can see what fan headers are populated and how fast they're spinning what IO is

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filled on the back of your board and what SATA headers are filled and the

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corresponding drive that is connected to them amongst other things one gripe that

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I did have with MSI's ufi was odd scrolling issues where I would try to

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scroll down but instead of the selection going down it would keep jumping up to

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where my mouse was or where I was scrolling making navigation by scrolling

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rather frustrating and resulting in relying on my keyboard for everything

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other than clicking on large buttons something that I was hoping we would

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have moved on from this far into the UEFI game so kudos to you if you've made

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it this far through the video the prize is the conclusion because For the First

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Time in this series we need to cla a winner and a runner up some explanation

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is needed for why we didn't do this before and that is because the answer

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was well it depends on whatever ports

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you need or what color bants you're wearing or whatever things are outside

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of our control but for this one we wanted to assign an overall ranking for

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non bugginess and general ease of use my top rated board was a Seuss with MSI as

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a runner up both of these boards worked with every USB device we tested them

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with both of these board had detailed and well implemented fan controls and

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both of these boards had a well implemented quick selection menu

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although I liked ASUS's a bit more and ASUS didn't have issues with mouse

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scrolling which is why they took home the gold medal today but in the end mine

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is not the only opinion so let's hear what you guys have to say about these

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ufi BIOS implementations let me know what you like the most in the comments

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down below or if you want to have me actually read them answer over on the

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Forum all right guys while you're down below commenting on which ufi setup you

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liked the most don't forget to like or dislike this video depending on the

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color of your pants I guess favorite subscribe if you haven't for some reason

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already done that and share this video if you want to help people pick a

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motherboard over on the Forum comment there so that I actually read it if you

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want get if you want to get rid of ads cuz there aren't any right now there

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probably will be soon but there aren't any right now become a contributor also

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we have something pretty cool coming for the contributor and other users of the

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Forum fairly soon so stay tuned for that if you want to buy a shirt that isn't a

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purple twitch shirt but has cooler stuff on it like keep on digging check out the

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shirt description down below this video and thank you for watching I'll see you

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next time oh my goodness that was almost

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really bad this is not a shirt that you can buy lonus thought it was a shirt you

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could buy it's not