UEFI BIOS
As you might expect, the BIOSTAR Z590I VALKYRIE utilizes an American Megatrends Inc. UEFI BIOS ROM. This is the first UEFI implementation I’ve seen from BIOSTAR in quite some time, so I wasn’t sure what to expect initially.
BIOSTAR’s UI design is rather good. It’s an interesting cross between MSI’s Click BIOS 5 and ASUS’ implementation if I had to liken it to anything else on the market. The main difference vs. ASUS is that BIOSTAR put all the health information that’s on the right on the left side.
The actual menus more closely resemble MSI’s. None of these observations are a bad thing. The menus are in fact very intuitive and easy to navigate, especially when you’ve used either ASUS or MSI motherboards in the past. The only complain I would really leverage against BIOSTAR here is the gray font on the gray background. While usually easy on the eyes, settings not highlighted could be difficult to see for some people. However, this differentiates items you can adjust from ones you can’t quite nicely.
Plus or minus keys increment and decrement values. You can also hit enter on settings or click on them to change the options. This is consistent throughout the menus, which is a good thing. Some UEFI’s I’ve seen in the past may have different input methods in different areas as though different teams designed certain aspects of the interface.
The memory timings menu is quite complex on most of these boards. BIOSTAR does a better job of organizing these than most motherboard makers do. One final note I would make here is that the PC Health status menu isn’t terribly robust. You also don’t have a great deal of fan control from within the UEFI. On that front, the solution feels very budget-oriented. Strictly speaking, price-wise that’s not quite accurate. However, it’s not an ultra-high-end motherboard either.