welcome to the third installment of the $1 100ish doll z97 motherboard Showdown
this video got bumped back many times from CES to getting sick twice and the
GTX 960 launch Etc but enough with
excuses The Show Must Go On as with the previous two videos we will be exploring
the world of affordable motherboards instead of top tier motherboards which
are expensive and don't really impact
performance we are doing this because we want to explore the pros and cons and
trade-offs of boards people are actually
buying in this video we will be covering the UEFI BIOS experience of each board
things like USB drive uh peripherals RAM
compatibility all that kind of stuff and other things just the usability of the
motherboard also stay subscribed for part four where we will be covering the
finished system experience and the final conclusion of this whole series
cooler Masters case mod World Series is your opportunity to show off your
modding skills and win great prizes entries Clos February 7th 2015 click now
to learn more I was delightfully surprised when each board not only
worked with every keyboard and mouse but also was able to post with XMP for each
RAM kit what was expected and yet no
less incredibly frustrating however was the issues that I encountered with flash
drive compatibility there are a few things more frustrating than being stuck
with a board that needs a ufi BIOS update no optical drive and a flash
drive that won't detect but that being
said this may not be that big of an issue as many of you probably have a few
old flash drives laying around which tend to work a lot more often but
whether it's during an update or something else what if your ufi BIOS
gets corrupted how will you recover well luckily the Gigabyte board comes with
dual UEFI BIOS support so can easily just switch from your corrupted one to a
fresh new one uh in basically no time but also noteworthy is that the ASUS
board and the ASRock board have swappable BIOS chips which may be a
little annoying as you would need to contact a manufacturer for a replacement
but at least it gives you the option of repairing your board while MSI includes
no actual other safeguards now onto what
I know a lot of you have been actually waiting for the actual usability of the
UEFI BIOS but a few disclaimers must be
made here first each one of these UEFI BIOS setups could have easily taken an
entire video dedicated to them naturally
I will be focusing on what makes each of these experiences unique Instead at
their core they all provide the same general functionality you can review
core system specs change your boot device set up a password for system boot
Etc as there is virtually no difference in the overclocking capabilities due to
Intel moving more and more things onto
the chip every time this leaves ease of use quirks and standout features as the
focus of this segment another important disclaimer is that many things that I
talk about will be my opinion but for
your convenience I will be including as much footage of each ufi BIOS as
possible so you can come to your own conclusions we'll start with a Seuss the
easy mode start page is amazing to be honest before writing this review I
would always skip right over the easy mode and and go into Advance mode right
away but once I actually looked at it it has almost everything an average user
will need to access quickly system information RAM SATA configuration easy
tuning boot priority and a boot menu for overriding boot order if you need to
oneoff boot to something like say a flash drive XMP settings irst on or off
and a dedicated fan control setting which includes four different profiles
manual control which is fantastic in granularity of seeming 1% a pwm or DC
switch and a quick view for what fans are plugged in and their current status
along with various helpful keyboard shortcuts clearly labeled along the
bottom moving on to advanced mode we have all the detailed fine-tuning
options that you would expect out of an advanced mode and all of these options
are under sensible headers along with a detailed hardware monitor nicely and
permanently fixed on the right hand side the hot keys are no longer against the
bottom like they were in Easy Mode but you you can find a handy list available
in the top right hand corner which will lay them all out for you there's also a
favorite section which you can add things to so if you know you're going to
commonly be tweaking something you can add it there and there's also the nice
additional functionality of an inbios notepad if you need to leave reminders
for yourself for various future information also at any time you can
check what has recently been changed which is great but even more helpful
than that is the details of what has changed this visit which will pop up
when you save an exit from your UEFI BIOS next up we have azrock azrock
didn't have a quick start page but you can decide what page your UEFI will boot
into and that's quite handy and there's
a ufi guide wait what what the f is a
ufi guide well at first I thought it was going to be essentially Microsoft's
clippy but for ufi turns out I was wrong
the guide basically gives you a tour of asrock's ufi and tries to tell you how
things work for complete beginners it does contain some useful nuggets of
information but the implementation could have been a lot better it starts with
please remain seated and keep your hands away from the mouse and keyboard at all
times and I think to a degree they were actually serious other than pressing
escape to abort the guide doesn't have any real functionality no pause no
forward or back nothing so let's just
move on there's a favorite section on the main page it's a selectable button
that you can file things under not its own page like some other implementations
but to each their own and there's no real hotkey information list which I
found a little annoying you can find
hotkeys Associated by certain functions by highlighting them but that doesn't
really help you unless you memorize them especially since so many different
boards have different keys for different things other than F10 which is generally
being save and exit one unexpected feature is their dehumidifier function
that turns the computer on and spins the fan if it detects excessive humidity you
can check out asrock's video about this here overall asrock's ufi layout feels a
little outdated and unexceptional but that doesn't make it bad it gets the job
done without a bunch of extra junk in the way and that might be exactly what
you're looking for then we come to Gigabyte right off the top I have to say
this UEFI is aesthetically great overall
I'm happy to see that they included a startup guide which is essentially Quick
Settings right when you enter the buyo although it could maybe do with some
more useful selections considering system language system time security
load defaults and exit are over half the
buttons I think it would be more likely to get used if it had some more commonly
accessed settings and additionally you still have to click through these in
order to get to those settings anyways as they're just essentially large
shortcuts which kind of defeats the purpose of having a quick screen in my
my opinion but speaking of defeating the purpose and all that ranting aside you
can choose what menu type you want to boot into by clicking on Startup options
and changing the selected box now hold
up wait a minute you might be wondering what is Smart tweak mode and if there's
smart tweak mode what is classic Mode well before we went into startup options
did you notice those little gray lines on the left and right hand side yeah
those ones well they turn into arrows when you highlight them the left one
puts you into smart tweak mode and the right arrow puts you into classic Mode
classic Mode is pretty much exactly what you would expect it looks a little old
or should I say classic everything is right about where you'd expect it to be
there's no real surprises Frills or gimmicks but your hotkeys are nicely
laid out along the right hand side along with any additional extra information
about whatever you have currently selected it's nice enough but a little
boring so what exactly is smart tweak
mode smart tweak mode is essentially another skin for your ufi so yes there
are two different skin options for your ufi BIOS and a quick options UI holy
crap anyway smart tweak mode is the one I'd use it looks wonderfully modern and
it runs at up to 1080p on supported monitors and has a cool high-res graphic
in the background and nicely detailed status information wrapping around the
outside of your settings menus for some weird reason that goes away when you
select save an exit tab which is a little weird and your hotkey information
is on an unnecessarily scrolling bar along the bottom which should really
just stay put so you can actually read everything instead of waiting for it to
come back around but aside from some minor weirdness everything seems to be
fairly logically laid out with the major tabs being broken up into subtabs that
mostly remove the need to scroll by making it so that nearly everything is
above the fold which is a nice touch last but possibly not least we have MSI
for whatever reason when I first booted into MSI's ufi BIOS I didn't realize
that anything in the top Blue Ribbon was clickable it just looked like static
information at first that you would change elsewhere in the ufi eventually I
clued into the very obvious fact that you're able to interact with this area
in order to change your boot order OC Genie and XMP settings quickly and
easily which is a nice mix of adding a quick selection menu but also not adding
additional clicks for a user that just wants to actually get to what they
needed cuz they're more advanced moving on to the extremely large clickable
buttons we find that the settings OC M
Flash and OC profile areas are pretty standard Fair no surprises here but once
you get to hardware monitor and board Explorer things get a little bit more
interesting starting with hardware monitor you have manual control of all
your fans including four different levels of control while you have them in
smart fan mode and one level of control
when they're not in smart fan mode you also have the options to set all of your
fans to full speed set all of your fans to the default curve or cancel
everything out board explore is a cool little tool that will allow you to see a
graphical representation of what things are connected to your motherboard you
can see what fan headers are populated and how fast they're spinning what IO is
filled on the back of your board and what SATA headers are filled and the
corresponding drive that is connected to them amongst other things one gripe that
I did have with MSI's ufi was odd scrolling issues where I would try to
scroll down but instead of the selection going down it would keep jumping up to
where my mouse was or where I was scrolling making navigation by scrolling
rather frustrating and resulting in relying on my keyboard for everything
other than clicking on large buttons something that I was hoping we would
have moved on from this far into the UEFI game so kudos to you if you've made
it this far through the video the prize is the conclusion because For the First
Time in this series we need to cla a winner and a runner up some explanation
is needed for why we didn't do this before and that is because the answer
was well it depends on whatever ports
you need or what color bants you're wearing or whatever things are outside
of our control but for this one we wanted to assign an overall ranking for
non bugginess and general ease of use my top rated board was a Seuss with MSI as
a runner up both of these boards worked with every USB device we tested them
with both of these board had detailed and well implemented fan controls and
both of these boards had a well implemented quick selection menu
although I liked ASUS's a bit more and ASUS didn't have issues with mouse
scrolling which is why they took home the gold medal today but in the end mine
is not the only opinion so let's hear what you guys have to say about these
ufi BIOS implementations let me know what you like the most in the comments
down below or if you want to have me actually read them answer over on the
Forum all right guys while you're down below commenting on which ufi setup you
liked the most don't forget to like or dislike this video depending on the
color of your pants I guess favorite subscribe if you haven't for some reason
already done that and share this video if you want to help people pick a
motherboard over on the Forum comment there so that I actually read it if you
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