The BIOS:

The first screen that the board will display is the Black Series splash screen; on the same screen we are displayed the keys to press for accessing the BIOS setup or the boot menu:



In the POST screen, we can find information regarding the board name, BIOS release date, the name of the CPU and its rated speed, the speed at which the IMC is operating (which is sometimes displayed wrong, in my case I was running at 1600MHz speed), the operating mode, total memory quantity installed and detected HDD/SSD/optical drives:



The main BIOS menu displays the usual options like we have seen on many boards before like Standard CMOS Setup, Advanced Setup and so on:



In the Standard CMOS Setup menu, we can set the date/time or see the installed drives:



In the Advanced Setup menu, most of the Intel CPU features can be enabled/disabled, like Virtualization, EIST; here we also can set the boot priority or enable/disable the eJiffy function:



The Advanced Chipset Setup menu holds only the Memory Remap Feature setting:



In the Integrated Peripherals menu, the SATA Configuration can be modified; the onboard SATA controllers can be enabled/disabled along with the audio, LAN functions or USB functions:



In the Power Management Setup menu, we can see most of the known settings from other boards, with two extra options named Onboard Button LED and Deep Green:



The PCI/PnP Setup menu holds a single option; with its help, we can set which display adapter to initialize first:



The PC Health Status menu holds the Smart Fan Function, along with the shutdown temperature setting; here we can see the CPU and system temperature, the CPU and system fan speeds (not all fan headers are monitored), but also the voltages:



The Smart Fan Function has some advanced options, like setting the fan start PWM, fan start TEMP, DeltaT, or Fan Slope PWM value:



The MB Intelligent BIOS overclock menu has been revised an now it is named X; its ease of use is many times better than the previous versions and I could reach 4GHz without any problems at all. On top of the menu, we can see the CPU, memory and QPI frequencies that will be applied, we can set the DRAM frequency ratio, the RAM timings or let the motherboard set it by SPD, the QPI Ratio, CPU BCLK:



On the bottom of the same menu, we can access the voltage modifier functions, which can be upped by increments:



A very welcome BIOS menu which I have not seen from ECS on previous motherboards is the Load Profile Settings; here we can save or load our preferred CMOS settings, without the need to re-do them every time we need to:



Getting eJiffy

If the eJiffy Linux distribution is installed and the option in BIOS is enabled, we will be welcomed with the following screen, in which we can select to boot the OS, run eJiffy or run the BIOS setup:



After the eJiffy option is selected, the loading progress bar will appear:



When the load is complete, we will be presented with the eJiffy desktop, where we can choose to run the disk explorer, chat program, browser and other applications; this eJiffy feature is useful if we want to get an information fast or chat with someone, without the need to boot the main operating system: