New Asus BIOS 1805

Wats · January 28, 2013

The new Asus BIOS update has been out for a few weeks now. I have been playing with the new 1805 BIOS for a couple of hours now. Coming from the 1708 BIOS, I noticed the differences between the two almost instantly. Not saying the all the differences are a good thing though...

Why should you update your Asus BIOS to 1805? Your boot time will be reduced is why! It is much faster to get to-and-through the splash screen with 1805 than it was with any of the other BIOS'. Not only will your boot time be reduced, your synthetic benchmarks will generally score higher. I use Cinebench for most of my CPU benching and after re-OCing my 3570k to 4.7Ghz (where it was before update, same BIOS settings as before) I was greeted by a .02 point increase. That is the kind of increase you get from moving your memory from the far slots to the correct, closer to the CPU slots. Just from a BIOS update. Might of been a fluke, but I only have one Z77 Asus board and I ran that benchmarks at least 20 times, reproducing the result more than three-quarters of the time. When you are benching, every little bit helps.

Why you should NOT update your Asus BIOS to 1805: Gahhh! The function keys just do not work. The options were there... But F7 to Advanced mode didn't work, F10 to save and quit didn't work. Even after you flash the BIOS, your'e asked to press F1 on the first boot. Which I could not. Forcing me to push the Reset switch. I could not get them to work, so I had to use the UEFI mode mouse and scrolly-wheel for everything, which seems better/smoother in this new update. I miss my F keys...

So I guess it is a trade off of function keys for boot speed. Which I'm kind of enjoying that extra...Second.

If I could do it again, I wouldn't of bothered updating, re-OCing, benching, stability testing just for that extra second off the boot time. If you use your function keys, don't update.

Any thoughts or comments on 1805, please share :)

phillychuck · January 28, 2013

First, unless I'm blind you didn't even state what motherboard this is for. It also doesn't seem like news or a review?

IdeaStormer · January 28, 2013

I noticed the version number changed to 1805, that was about it.

jaypro · January 28, 2013

My usual thing for BIOS updates is, if it ain't broke, don't update.

Manufacturers don't update the BIOS to add extra features, they add them to fix features. If you don't notice which features are broken, then fixing them won't matter.