The ASUS UEFI firmware exposes an ACPI table to Windows 10, called 'WPBT' or 'Windows Platform Binary Table'. After digging around in the UEFI BIOS, we managed to find a fairly nondescript option 'Download and Install ARMOURY CRATE app', which of course defaults to 'on' and it's not easy to find, being located in the 'Tool' section of the BIOS setup. This is a very useful feature, as it establishes a method to install network driver and other drivers easily, without the need for a physical driver disc (in times where nobody has an optical drive anymore). The files themselves, which total around 3.6 MB in size, appear harmless, and belong to an ASUS-made program called 'ASUS Armoury Crate.' This program fetches the latest drivers for your hardware from ASUS servers, and installs them for you in an automated process with little user-intervention. These files could not have come from either our Windows image or the network, leaving the motherboard's 16-megabyte UEFI BIOS as the only suspect. Upon further investigation we also found a new, already running, system service called 'AsusUpdateCheck.' We discovered three ASUS-signed files in our Windows 10 System32 folder, which, so it seems, magically appeared on our harddrive out of thin air. This got us curious and we scanned the system for any files that aren't part of the standard MS Windows installation.

Upon first boot, with the machine having no LAN or Internet connectivity, we were greeted by an ASUS-specific window in the bottom right corner of our screen, asking whether we'd like to install the network drivers and download 'Armoury Crate'. Our Windows 10 image is based on Windows 10 April 2018 Update and lacks in-built drivers for the integrated network controllers. the machine has no Internet or LAN access). This process happens in complete network-isolation (i.e. During testing for our Intel Core i9-9900K review we found out that new ASUS Z390 motherboards automatically install software and drivers to your Windows 10 System, without the need for network access, and without any user knowledge or confirmation.

Armoury crate installer