 Welcome to the third installment of the $100ish Z97 motherboard showdown. This video got bumped back many times, from CES to getting sick twice, and the GTX 960 launch, 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 four, where we will be covering the finished system experience, and the final conclusion of this whole series. Cooler Master's Case Mod World series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes. Entries close 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 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 the ASUS board and the ASRock board have swappable BIOS chips, which may be a little annoying, as 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, onto what I know a lot of you have been actually waiting for, the actual usability of the UEFI BIOS. But, a few disclaimers 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 talk 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. We'll start with ASUS. 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 detailed hardware monitor nicely and permanently fixed on the right-hand side. The hotkeys are no longer against the bottom, like they were in 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 ASRock. ASRock didn't have a Quick Start page, but you can decide what page your UEFI will boot into, and that's quite handy. And there's a UEFI Guide. Wait, what? What the F is a UEFI Guide? Well, at first, I thought it was going to be essentially Microsoft's Clippy, but for UEFI. Turns out I was wrong. The Guide basically gives you a tour of ASRock's 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 Guide doesn't have any real functionality. No pause, 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 ASRock's video about this here. Overall, ASRock's UEFI layout feels a little outdated and unexceptional, but 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 accessed settings. And additionally, you still have to click through these in order to get to those settings anyways, as they're 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. Anyways, 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 booted into MSI's 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 into 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, M-Flash, and OC profile areas are pretty standard fare, no surprises here. But once you get to Hardware Monitor and Board Explorer, 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.O. is filled on the back of your 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 MSI's UEFI was odd mouse scrolling 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 where I was 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 pants you're wearing, or whatever things are outside of our control. But for this one, we wanted to assign an overall ranking for non-buggyness and general ease of use. My top-rated board was ASUS with MSI as a runner-up. Both of these boards worked with every USB device we tested them with. Both of these boards had detailed and well-implemented fan controls, and both of these boards had a well-implemented quick selection menu, although I liked ASUS's a bit more, and ASUS didn't have issues with mouse 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. All right guys, while you're down below commenting on which UEFI setup 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. 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