EVGA’s New BIOS Interface, with Built-In Stress Testing
by Ian Cutress on June 5, 2018 2:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- EVGA
- Trade Shows
- UEFI
- X299
- BIOS
- Computex 2018
- Stress Test
One of the criticisms over the years is that EVGA has not been on par with the major motherboard manufacturers when it comes to their BIOS/UEFI interface and feature set. Truth be told, the other vendors have dozens of engineers working on them, whereas EVGA only has a handful. Despite this, EVGA has slowly crept up to match the other vendors by slowly adding the latest options. For the first time it seems, EVGA now has the march with a new feature not seen on other products. We have seen stress testing before to find the best overclock, but we’ve never seen a direct stress test before.
The key to what EVGA provides is that users can manually invoke a stress test based on their current configurations while in the BIOS. The stress test will implement a Prime95-like CPU stress, and the BIOS will fire up a display that shows the frequency, voltage, and temperature of the CPU. Normally in the past, we would expect the interface to be slow (because it’s in the BIOS), but EVGA updates the display at a proper refresh rate, showing the live results of the sensors on board.
The new BIOS is also higher resolution, and has an EZ-mode so users can go into an OC Robot mode (to find a good overclock) or into a Gamer mode focused on what matters for gamers.
EVGA expects to roll out the new interface very soon, starting with its X299 motherboards first.
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4 Comments
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austinsguitar - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
see this is the best thing there is. nobody wants to go into windows and run stuff to suddenly brake. this will save overclockers a lot of time. about 30 minutes if your really fine tuning :) i like this idea!hanselltc - Thursday, June 7, 2018 - link
If they make a board for AMD I'd swap out my Asus one to try this BIOS out.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
am sure other motherboard makers can do and do, do the same thing. Truth be told from my personal experience (as well as from reading countless reviews of such) the unfortunate thing is just because it is BIOS stable does not make ire a usable desktop stable (once the operating system loads it)it should be, but often is not for whatever reason.
I am 100% with you however, we damn well should be able to test NOT using a desktop operating system environment just to "test" the overclock/settings, BIOS/UEFI is generally far far more stable than it was 5 or 10 years ago, but at the same time for as long as they have been making these things (20+ years?) they really should be bullet proof and no use the consumers as guinea pigs to find problems they can and should find (within reason) before they put it on the shelf.
such as Ryzen 2xxx not working "out of the box" and needing a boot kit shipped from AMD.
I do like how EVGA appears to be the FIRST motherboard vendor to get rid of a driver "disk" and is now using a USB included in the box instead for truly plug and play type installation, all makers should follow this example because of the fact most computer cases (at lest the desirable ones) have completely gotten rid of optical drive bays, and because of sometimes the OS not able to use the motherboard/cpu or whatever first time out, you NEED the drivers to make them function (not always, but way more than we should be needing them of course)
yes Win 10 includes "more" of the drivers etc auto installing, but we generally have ZERO control of what it does or does not install, which is never a good thing (could mean killing that brand new part that needs a very specific driver to function properly etc).
anyways Prime95 is a decent stability tester, far from the only one, seeing as it is Intel specific motherboard vendor, they should have also done a heaven and a Intel Burn Test as part of the overclocking test "suite" so 99% of bases are covered for overall system stability testing ^.^
good on EVGA though, really wish they would also do AMD support because there are very few other makers that are as "renowned" as EVGA is (not the best, but they REALLY support their products compared to many other vendors AIB/OEM alike.)
JayanWarden - Thursday, June 7, 2018 - link
Uhm. Heaven is not possible from within the BIOS.