The BIOS
The Asus P7P55D EVO uses the American Megatrends BIOS, as does most Asus motherboards. It is a tabbed BIOS with submenus for easy navigation.

The BIOS opens to the Main menu which contains found drives and submenus for system information and hard drive setup.

Next is the AI Tweaker menu where all performance and overclocking settings take place. There are a lot of tweaks here and make things seem overly complicated, but it really isn’t. There are only two submenus, one for Uncore settings (a carryover term from LGA 1366) and for memory timings, they help keep the menu less cluttered.

There is a warning popup that makes you stop and think about memory voltage when you adjust the Vdimm itself, or any other setting that automatically adjusts the Vdimm. Memory voltage should never be set above 1.65v as you will damage the CPU’s memory controller.

The Advanced menu has a series of submenus that contain most other system settings.

The Onboard Devices submenu contains settings for things like the LAN controller, IEEE 1394 Controller, and the eSATA controller.

The CPU Configuration submenu contains CPU settings that aren’t found in the AI Tweak menu, such as SpeedStep and Halt/C-State settings.

The Power menu contains Power related settings and submenus.

The H/W Monitor is a submenu of the Power menu. Besides temps/voltages, there are custom settings for all motherboard fan connectors.

The Boot menu has boot device priority, and submenus for Boot Configuration, Hard Drives, and Optical Drives.

The Boot Configuration submenu contains a few boot related settings, including disabling the POST splash screen, which is always the first thing I do when setting up a new motherboard.