UEFI BIOS:
Motherboard firmware has come a long way since the transition from old school Bios to the latest UEFI’s, and after spending some time with the Hi-Fi Z97WE’s UEFI, it feels as though they haven’t caught up with the rest of the competition. Biostar included most of the basic functionality you would expect to find in the bios, but unless you’re an experienced tweaker, you may find yourself fumbling around the bios looking for the settings your trying to customize.
Navigating around the bios with your mouse and keyboard works as expected, but there isn’t a ton of contextual help and the manual offers next to no help at all. When navigated over to the fan control options, we were delighted to see such a variety of options. Unfortunately, they were a little more complicated than we had hoped and found out that the settings don’t allow you to turn off the specified fans and can only be adjusted to their lowest default speed.
The overclocking settings on the Hi-Fi Z97WE could have been made to be more convenient for enthusiasts by combining the the more commonly used overclocking settings, such as the voltage and CPU multiplier into their own separate page. Instead of having two separate pages, making it more convenient for the users from not having to switch back and forth in order to make adjustments.
Overall, the Hi-Fi Z97WE’s UEFI seemed to be a little clunky and not up to speed with the rest of the competition. Hopefully will will see an update from Biostar in the near future, making the changes necessary in order to smooth out the navigation and making it feel less awkward than the current.
Overclocking:
The test bench:
- Hi-Fi Z97WE
- Zotac Geforce GTX 780 Video Card
- 16 GB DDR3 1600 RAM
- Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme Cooler
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1050W Power Supply
- Intel 4790K CPU
Unfortunately for this review the motherboard we received had stability issues and we could not overclock our CPU. We tested our CPU with some higher end motherboards and had no problem at all. After doing some research we couldn’t find any others who had this problem, which leads us to believe that it isn’t a very common issue and that sometimes these things happen with hardware. Now let’s take a look at our benchmarking results.
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