Gadgetory

welcome to the third installment of the 100 ish dollars at 97 motherboard showdown this video got bumped back many times from CES to getting sick twice and the GTX 960 launched 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 peripherals Ram compatibility all that kind of stuff and other things just the usability of the motherboard also stay subscribed for part 4 where we will be covering the finished system experience and the final conclusion of this whole series cooler masters casemod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries closed 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 UEFI 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 UEFI BIOS gets corrupted how will you recover well luckily the gigabyte board comes with dual UEFI BIOS support so you can easily just switch from your corrupted one to a fresh new one in basically no time but also noteworthy is that da soos board and the as rock board has swappable BIOS chips which may be a little annoying is 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 on to what I know a lot of you have been actually waiting for the actual usability of the UEFI BIOS but a few disclaimers bus 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 talked about will be my opinion but for your convenience I will be including as much footage of each UEFI BIOS as possible so you can come to your own conclusions well 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 go into advanced 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 one off 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 seemingly 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 tattled hardware monitor nicely and permanently fixed on the right hand side the hot keys are no longer against the bottom like there were an easy mode but 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 there's also the nice additional functionality of an in BIOS notepad if you need to leave reminders for yourself of various feature 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 and exit from your UEFI BIOS next up we have as rock as orc didn't have a QuickStart page but you can decide what page are you AFI will boot into and that's quite handy and there's a UEFI guide wait what what the f is UEFI guide what first I thought it was going to be essentially Microsoft's Clippy but for you if I turns out I was wrong the guide basically gives you a tour of as rocks UEFI 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 guy doesn't have any real functionality no paws 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 as rocks video about this here overall as rocks UAF I'd lay out feels a little outdated and unexceptional 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 BIOS 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 access settings and additionally you still have to click through these in order to get to those settings anyways as they are just essentially large shortcuts which kind of defeats the purpose of having a quick screen in 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 UEFI so yes there are two different skin options for your UEFI 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 and 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 sub tabs 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 moved it into Emma sized UEFI 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 UEFI eventually I clued in to 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 because they're more advanced moving on to the extremely large clickable buttons we find that the settings OC em flash and OC profile areas are pretty standard fare no surprises here but once you get to hardware monitor and board explore 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 Explorer 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 I always filled on the back yard 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 Emma size UEFI was odd most growing 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 we're out 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 declare 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 bets 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 soos 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 a soos is a bit more and a soos didn't have issues with most 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 UEFI 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 alright guys while you're down below commenting on which you if I set up 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 want to get if you want to get rid of ads because there aren't any right now there probably will be soon but there aren't any right now become a contributor also we have something pretty cool coming for the contributors and other users of the forum fairly soon so stay tuned for that if you want to buy a shirt that isn't a purple twit shirt but has cooler stuff on it like keep on digging check out the shirt description down below this video and thank you for watching I'll see you next time oh my goodness that was almost really bad this is not a shirt that you can buy Linus thought it was a shirt you could buy it's not