What the heck? My BIOS screen has 1080p now

Yesterday I built a gaming PC in a compact chassis using the ROG Strix X870-I Gaming Wireless, one of Asus’ latest tiny motherboards. To my surprise, the cutesy PC booted up first time. To my greater surprise, I saw the BIOS on my screen in a crisp and clear finish.

"Wow", thought I to myself, as I stared at the sharp edges which replaced the fuzzy 768p of decades past, "they finally achieved it."

I then hurriedly set out to find out when this change occurred. It turns out that Asus announced this change back in August along with a few other important changes to the BIOS.

The change was rolled out on X870 chipset motherboards and X870E for AMD's Ryzen 9000 series.

"We are increasing the resolution of our BIOS to 1920x1080. Asus says that with this change you will be able see more content on a single screen, making it easier for you to scan the available settings and find those you need.

It's also not just a change in appearance. A higher resolution allows for more settings to be displayed on a single screen, which means that you can navigate through menus and scroll less. It also means that my mouse behaves less erratically in the BIOS as high DPI mice are nearly uncontrollable at low resolutions.

Over the past few months, I've relied on Asus and MSI boards for the majority of my processor testing. Neither has offered a better BIOS resolution. This is why I feel like this is a major change.

ASRock motherboards are already living in the future. ASRock motherboards already have a higher-resolution BIOS screen. Owners of ASRock boards may wonder why I am bringing up this newfangled invention for 2024. You don't realize how much you've been spoiled all these years.

Unfortunately, I have not found any evidence that MSI has made a similar upgrade. The company's boards are now a glaring exception. Even the Z890 motherboards that my colleague Nick is testing today do not have any resolution bump.

This update also does not appear to be retroactive for older motherboards. We've tried updating a few older Asus motherboards with the latest BIOS available, but no luck. This suggests that there's more to this than you might think.

Hey, at least Asus is bringing some tangible improvements to its BIOS by 2024. And well done ASRock for being 3 steps ahead of the rest.