The BIOS:
As far as the BIOS of our ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial is concerned, at first glance we can see that we’re with ASUS, so there’s no change here. Those familiar with the brand will have no trouble finding their way around. As a reminder, the tab of greatest interest to us is “Extreme Tweaker”. The BIOS is virtually identical to that of the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX, yes, that’s right.
Before we start, we’d like to remind you that it’s essential to update your BIOS regularly. The advantage of a ROG card is that the team of engineers and overclockers behind it is very active. But it had to happen, so before starting our tests, we updated the BIOS to the latest available: 0703 dated March 16, 2026. The BIOS never allowed us to activate the memory profile, even with several memory kits. So we switched back to 0606 dated February 10th.
BIOS flash of this ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial :
As we said, the first thing to avoid unpleasant surprises is to update your BIOS. We’d like to remind you of the simple procedure for flashing your BIOS, which is essential if you want to keep your configuration perfectly stable.
Go to the ASUS website and your motherboard page to download the latest BIOS, place it on a key and insert it into a USB port on the motherboard. Restart the PC, press and hold the “DEL” or “Suppr” key to access the BIOS parameters. Go to the “Tool” tab and click on “ASUS EZ Flash 3 Utility”. When the flash interface appears, choose the BIOS location on your key, and off you go to flash. With AMD, the motherboard will reboot before starting the flash and restart several times afterwards to last an average of five minutes.
The EXPO profile:
Now that our BIOS is up to date, let’s start with our memory kit parameters, which are essential and should be activated as a matter of priority. As you can see, there are several profiles available: EXPO I, EXPO II, EXPO Tweaked and EXPO on the fly. It’s difficult to generalize, but sometimes EXPO Tweaked offers slightly better performance.
By activating the EXPO profile, the parameters for frequency, timings and voltages are automatically set, so you don’t need to do anything else. The BIOS also offers a series of memory profiles up to 8,400 MT/s. You’ll need to know the make and model of the on-board chips to choose the right profile(s).
Note the arrival of a very interesting option, eCLK mode, which allows you to desynchronize the PCIe CPU frequency. It will now be possible to push the frequency of your processor via BCLK.
Other BIOS options :
By default, the BIOS opens to the condensed BIOS section. This part is mainly aimed at beginners or those who don’t want to get their hands dirty with overly complex options. From here, you can activate your memory kit’s EXPO profile, control your fan management, flash the BIOS, manage the backlighting, and set the boot sequence priority.
To access the full BIOS, in advanced mode, simply press F7. Several tabs are at your disposal, and personally, it’s in the ” Extreme Tweaker ” tab that we’ll be spending the most time. As we saw above, you can activate EXPO, set the various tweaks and act on the different voltages.
Of course, the BIOS also offers a series of options for overclocking your AMD processor, either via PBO mode or manually. Personally, we prefer to overclock under OS via AMD Ryzen Master. In a few weeks’ time, we’ll be back with a tutorial on overclocking Ryzen 9000 processors.
Loadline calibration is in auto mode for comparison tests, but we’ll come back to its function when overclocking the Ryzen 9 9950X. By default, it is in “AUTO” mode.
New since the previous chipset, the BIOS now indicates an SP for your processor, but also for each core and for the CCDs. The SP is an indication of your processor’s overclocking potential. The higher the value, the better it should perform, requiring less voltage to operate, for example. Our Ryzen 9 9950X3D is rated at SP 120.
There’s also a section called “Q-Dashboard” where you’ll have access to a detailed view of your motherboard and all the components connected to it. You can choose to have a global view, or select only USB, only SATA, only M.2 disks, only PCIe or only FAN.
Don’t forget to save your profiles:
Finally, saving profiles is highly recommended when performing tests. It saves time. You can also save them on a USB key. Finally, there’s a LN2 mode, which must be activated via a jumper on the PCB. Please note that this mode is really dedicated to cold tests, so don’t activate it for air/water tests, as certain safeties will be automatically deactivated. Once it’s activated, you’ll find an LN2 CPU profile.
An ultra-complete BIOS, like that of the ROG Crosshair X870E APEX. Don’t hesitate to ask for advice on our forum and discord if you have any problems setting up your BIOS.
