Like ASUS, MSI has a UEFI BIOS menu which has mouse support and a graphical interface. ASUS didn’t bother to reinvent the wheel and it’s largely laid out like a BIOS, but items are easily clicked on, scrolled through, and found. This is not the case here. This is easily the worst BIOS interface I’ve ever seen. It’s offenses are numerous and I don’t know if I made notes of all of them, so I might actually miss some in the upcoming rant….er BIOS review. Before I get into just how bad this aspect of the P67A-GD80 truly is, let me say that we spoke to MSI about it before this section was even written, and they assure us that many sweeping changes are inbound. They acknowledged many of our issues and are hopeful that we will see changes, but when those changes are coming is still unknown.
OK, now that I’ve said that, and praised MSI for their acknowledgement on this issue, I can tell you that this BIOS sucks. It’s a word I don’t like to use in reviews because it’s not the most professional thing one can say, but trust me when I say, the MSI P67A-GD80’s UEFI BIOS sucks. I’d craft a further analogy of just how bad it sucks, but that would make this article NSFW and we do not want to do that.
Among the worst offenses are the quirks one has to deal with when using the BIOS are the flashing of objects. Blinking mouse cursors, etc. If you are epileptic, you might want to go with a different board. Assuming you can actually safely use a computer under normal circumstances. Another offense has to do with the fact that the layout is terrible. The amount of bright colors tend to blend together and just make the whole thing an eyesore. MSI calls the thing a click BIOS and that’s probably due to the amount of useless clicking you’ll do when trying to use it. Everything you can actually click on requires a double click. It’s really, really annoying. And many of the dialog boxes will partly disappear when you do click in them. Yes I did try multiple video cards with the same results. And despite the name "Click BIOS" you can’t click on much. Most of the actual board options and settings require keyboard input.
But wait, it gets worse. I know that’s hard to imagine, but it does. You can’t hold the arrow keys and scroll through menus. That’s right, you have to press the keys each time you want to move to options. You can use the page up and down keys, but those only go from the top of the menu to the other. Essentially doing what the home and end keys should do. Oh, and if that weren’t bad enough anytime you change category pages, the BIOS throws up a "Save and Exit" dialog box which you have to escape out of. In fact this dialog box seemed to come up randomly for a lot of inputs I made whether it made sense to do so or not. And to heap on another helping of punishment, many of the "utilities" included in the BIOS aside from the memory test feature don’t actually work. They all prompt for you to enter the driver DVD and then absolutely nothing happens.
I’ve been working in this industry professionally now for some 16 years or something like that. I’ve been reviewing boards now since around mid to late 2005. In all that time I’ve never seen or worked with a worse BIOS. This thing is absolutely painful to work with. I’m actually surprised I made it through the review process without destroying a keyboard or mouse in a fit of nerd rage. It’s really that horrible to deal with.
