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Thread: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

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    Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Are there any features that stand out, and how would you improve on what's currently available?
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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Loved my old x48 foxconn black ops, being able to change the stepping per core helped me clock it to the max.

    As for in general just having all the useful overclocking settings and simple fan control, I never touch any auto overclocks and such. For layout etc I am not that fussed, after a heavy clocking and stability testing I never visit again unless something goes wrong.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Well something which would be a nice improvement for a lot of BIOS's I've seen would be a clear explanation for what settings actually do and/or why you might want to change them, especially for more obscure ones. It might be OK for seasoned tinkerers but they can be very intimidating for new and even moderately experienced users, even for settings which have a simple explanation.

    For example, I've seen a lot of boards with a memory hole remapping setting, where the explanation is something along the lines of 'remaps memory hole'. Yeah, no s...

    GUI may look more welcoming to newcomers, but it in no way resolves the above problems.

    Some BIOS's use or alternative names for common settings. Well, anyone who's had experience with a few motherboards likely knows the sort of thing I'm on about.

    Reasonable default settings would be nice too, so newcomers needn't panic about getting simple settings correct.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    As with many electronics - they should allow for as much freedom of choice as possible. Or at least, that's my opinion.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    The first thing I do is click the advanced mode, as the GUI imo is just a vanity feature, it just looks pretty and lacks full set of options your MB is capable of. If you are tinkering with the BIOS in the first place you are of the Overclocker / Enthusiast type of user and not the novice newbie type of user anyways as almost all modern MB's work straight out of the box with nothing to be altered in the bios.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    44degrees ,where do you keep your pc,in a stove ?

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    One word: organization.

    Saves me the time of going back and forth, and for looking for things that aren't where they should be.

    It would be nice too if everyone used standardized terms. It's irritating when you're trying to help someone who has a different motherboard from a different manufacturer and each has their own ways of doing the same thing...all in all inefficiency.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    I still prefer ASUS P8P67 UEFI BIOS :


    Motherboard manufacturers should all aim to have excellent automated fan speed controlling like ASUS QFAN2. Gigabyte are the worst , where fan speed controlling can only be done from software after Windows starts ( telling from experience with G41 series )

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    It tells you everything that you don't even need to read the manual anymore.

    Navigation is really easy, and items of similar things are conveniently named and grouped together.

    Well, a bonus would be a light and color control for LED...if only a motherboard manufacturer would put in some fancy LEDs on a good shiny board. A white motherboard would look good too

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    As most of the mother boards today use a serial flash chip, to load the BIOS from, meaning the chipset or processor must have some characteristic to carry out the serial loading process, maybe it's time to move BIOS into a serial device such as a socketed SDCARD.

    Would make life easier if your BIOS gets corrupted etc!

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    "What makes a great motherboard BIOS?"

    Simplicity & Complexity !

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    What is this madness? Thought bios menus were still blue screens with white text.

    Shows how much I've been out of the loop.. XD

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Still waiting for:
    AUTO FINDING Max Stable Settings possible for each hardware changes it plugs to.

    So I no longer need to find best voltage, best frequency etc. for any processor I plugged in, nor finding best ram timings, etc.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Quote Originally Posted by hwarda View Post
    Still waiting for:
    AUTO FINDING Max Stable Settings possible for each hardware changes it plugs to.

    So I no longer need to find best voltage, best frequency etc. for any processor I plugged in, nor finding best ram timings, etc.
    Considering testing for stability is a complex process that takes a long time to test and tweak, and varies between individual chips, it's not something I'd expect to find with auto-overclocking on BIOS any time soon. This is why there are teams and competitions dedicated to overclocking.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Quote Originally Posted by xslavic View Post
    44degrees ,where do you keep your pc,in a stove ?
    The CPU is not in a power saving state when in the BIOS.

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    Re: Features - QOTW: What makes a great motherboard BIOS?

    Being operating system agnostic, and bug free. Fairly obvious imo. Bonus points for minimising the need to tinker.
    Quote Originally Posted by Agent View Post
    ...every time Creative bring out a new card range their advertising makes it sound like they have discovered a way to insert a thousand Chuck Norris super dwarfs in your ears...

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