Asus Sabertooth Z97 Mark 1 Motherboard Review

[section_title title=P5 : Software and BIOS]

Software and BIOS :

Asus includes a fairly rich set of software tools along with the board such as Thermal Radar 2, EZUpdate, USB Charge+, USB Boost and a few other tools/Utilities. The main one being the Thermal Radar 2. The board has 9 temperature sensors and 3 external temperature senors, all of which can be monitored here.  The first thing you can do is use the thermal tuning option, which will basically try to find a balance between fan speed and cooling. It will run your system at different loads and fan speeds and come up with a profile that is best suited for you.

The fan control option basically gives you full control over all the fans connected to the motherboard. You can even have different load profiles so that you can maintain the right balance between temperature and fan noise.

The BIOS that comes with the board is a UEFI bios. The look and feel is somewhat similar to that on other Asus boards. The BIOS has 2 modes, mainly the EZ Mode and the Advanced Mode. With the EZ Mode, you get the main information about the system on a single page and also some very simple tweaking options with EZ tuning.

Switching to the Advanced Mode, you get a lot more options. The main menus are Ai Tweaker, which has most of the overclocking related options, Advanced, where you can control functions such as RAID , USB configuration, PCH configuration and so on. Since this is a TUF series board, you also get a monitoring tab, where you can monitor various temperatures and fan speeds. You can have a look at all of these by clicking on the tab images below.