performance penalty, especially when
the two sockets on the board deliver
identical real world or perceived
performance.
SOFTWARE AND UEFI
So, there was a time when I was
firmly of the opinion that the best UEFI
in the business was on ROG boards.
There’s something to be said about
how simple it is to navigate and how
familiar it is after all these years. The
consistency here has paid off and it
does mean that when you first power
on a ROG board, you instinctively know
where to go. It may have dated over the
years a little but in terms of function,
simplicity and layout, it’s mostly
without fault. It could do with a Full HD
overhaul though, similar to what
ASRock is offering. If only so that it's
in line with the meticulous build and
construction of the boards.
Moreover, it would also provide more
screen space for the AI Tuner which
looks to be crammed into the bottom
right corner at present. These are
however, minor improvements which
could be made on what is an already
good UEFI.
In as far as windows software is
concerned, it’s quite possibly the best
in the business even if only in
presentation. AI Suite for instance, is
where you can take care of a whole
host of settings on your PC. It really is
a suite as you can control fan speeds,
monitor temperatures, set up cooling
profiles, overclock the system, and it
has a system cleaner of sorts. It’s a
significantly better interface and
presentation to what you’ll typically
find on competitor products. As
comprehensive a suite this is, it lacks
any form of LED control, for which
you need the AURA software.
Despite this, installing just two
applications is more than fair for
controlling what is essentially the
whole system. If at some point AURA
does become part of the AI suite, it
would be the most complete software
package there is for motherboards
From there, addition of GPU controls
(even rudimentary ones) for supported
graphics cards would make it peerless,
especially since GPUTweakIT in its
present form is in desperate need of an
overhaul.
In general AI suite is great, with just
about all the functionality you can want
outside of a few omissions. I do wish
however that the window was resizable
so it's usable on high PPI monitors
(much like Afterburner has a big Edition
skin. The convenience AI Suite brings
Issue 46 | 2019 The OverClocker 19