PART 4 – BIOS Tools And now as promised here’s a full description of the BIOS Tools for the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe – part 4

The ‘Tools’ menu in the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe BIOS offer three additional BIOS level applications. The first of these is the ‘ASUS EZ Flash 2′ which as the name suggests is designed to allow users to flash their BIOS easily.

ASUS EZ Flash 2
When you select the EZ Flash option from the menu it becomes immediately apparent that this is a seperate utility by the change of interface. The EZ Flash utility tells you which BIOS version you are currently using in a box at the top left. This information includes the board type, BIOS version number and BIOS compiled date. There is another box just to the right of this that shows the same information for the selected BIOS file so that you can compare the two. Then below there is a file lister with drive letters on the left and files and folders on the right. Note at this point that the utility will not read NTFS partitions, so you will not be able to download a BIOS file to your NTFS formatted hard drive and then re-boot and flash. You can of course use an appropriately formatted floppy drive or USB device, I’ve even managed to use a secure digital card in an internal USB card reader. Your first FAT formatted drive may be assigned the letter C: this is probably not the drive C: that you’re used to!

Using the utility is fairly straight forward, it’s navigated using cursor keys and ‘return’ and you can also use the ‘B’ key to create a backup of your current BIOS file. When you select a file to flash you get a message asking you to confirm your actions.

There’s not all that much more to it, it’s a simple utility and it does what it says it does and effectively. If you are happy flashing in windows then you may not end up using this utility at all because you can flash this board with a windows utility but if you don’t want the risk of windows crashing during a flashing then this will be a welcome addition.

ASUS Overclock Profile
With this utility you can save multiple versions of your BIOS settings. Within the flash memory there are two slots for saving to and these are accessed from the first screen.

Then in the OC Profile utility itself there’s the option to save as many sets of settings as you like to a FAT formatted drive / device.

This utility is very useful for the overclocker as you can save that huge overclock that pushes your rig to the limit in one slot and have another milder overclock in the second slot for everyday use. It’s also not that taxing to enter the BIOS on boot up and select your huge OC settings before a gaming session to get those extra fps and then revert back when you next reboot for everyday use.

The utility would also come in handy if you’d spent lots of time tweaking your settings and had found a perfect setup. You could then save it out to a USB flash device for safe keeping so that in the event of a CMOS battery failure or a need to reset the CMOS you can then easily restore your settings. In fact, if you’re really happy with your settings then you might want to even email them to a friend who has the same setup!

ASUS AI Net 2
This for me is the least useful of the utilities in this tools menu. It allows you to active or deactivate checking of the LAN cable integrity during POST (Power On Self Test).

I must say I’ve never had a LAN cable fail and it’s rare that one gets accidentally pulled out. Any networking problems I’ve had have all been operating system related and this would be of no help there. If you have wired networking built into your building then this is useful as you can confirm the connections without having to remove conduits and false walls. However this board is an enthusiast board not a main stream office business PC board, so I can’t see this utility getting much use. Feel free to leave a comment and disagree with me if you find otherwise.

If you’re eager for the next section of this review, click on over to part 5 now.

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