Advice on Installing Asus Uitilites

[kam67]

Hi,

Just received my new Ivy bridge gaming desktop (asus z877 pro, intel i7 3770k, geforce gtx 670 sli etc.) and would really appreciate some advise as to what asus utilities to install (if any). I am particularly interested in Ai Suite and the Asus PC Diagnostics. (Want to avoid the mistake of adding a lot of bloatware )

Thanks!

 

[vanthus]

In my experience the Asus utilities are pretty naff,personally I would use GPU Z for graphics card temp & fan speed,Core temp for CPU,HW monitor is also pretty good.

 

[tom_gr7]

What vanthus said lol,

But do note though, that ASUS Ai suite is needed to make use of many of your motherboards features, such as the usb3.0 fast charging thing, and fan expert which allows you to set profiles for the cpu fan speeds, worth a look in my opinion.

Also note, that on Asus ai suite, the cpu temp is not the CPU core temp, its the cpu socket temp, so use what Vanthus said coretemp or HWmonitor for cpu stuff.

For gpu stuff, i like MSi afterburner, JUst dont use any of the overclocking features!!!

 

[ReeceN]

Can I also add that the ASUS Ai suite is also very handy for downloading and upgrading your BIOS directly from within Windows which makes the proccess that little bit easier (and from what I have read sometimes even more reliable with some Asus boards) than burning and performing the update from disk.

 

[kam67]

Thanks for all your recommendations guys. As for bios flashing, I have heard that ez flash is much more reliable than the method involving updating the bios through windows.. Not sure if that is correct or not.

 

[vanthus]

I have updated the bios from both the OS option and EZ flash utility with a USB stick and had no problems,some sources say it's better to use the USB option but I don't think it matters.
Having said that I wouldn't do It unless having issues.

 

[kam67]

I have had one crash ( and forced reboot), with the message that 'windows has recovered from a critical error. '. Annoyingly, I was out of the room when that happened - at the time I was running a direct X 11 benchmark. I suspect it was a BSOD. I have now disabled the option for Windows to automatically restart, and am running 3d mark 11 on a loop to see if the issue reoccurs.

In a bit of a dilemma as to whether to flash the bios. It doesn't that Asus is very vague about what issues the latest version addresses ( this is for the asus z877 pro/ thunderbolt motherboard).

 

[kam67]

I am continuing this discussion in the thread 'Bios flashing using a (blue) USB port.' Please refer to that.