ASRock X58 Extreme Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

ASRock uses a slightly modified version of the American Megatrends AMIBIOS on their motherboards. The BIOS Menu is split into Main, Smart, Advanced, H/W Monitor, Boot, Security and Exit submenus. The Main Screen has the Time, Date, BIOS Version, Processor Type, Spee, Microcode Update, Cache and memory amounts.

Battery

The Smart Screen is where you can load various default settings including Performance Setup Default (IDE/SATA), Performance Setup AHCI Mode, Performance Setup RAID Mode, Power Saving Setup, Optimized CPU OC Setting, Load Optimized DDR3 2000 OC Setting and ASRock Instant Flash. Most of these features are self-explanatory. The Optimized CPU OC Setting allows the CPU to be set to 3.6 GHz, 3.7GHz, 3.8GHz, 3.9GHz, 4.0GHz and 4.2GHz. Instant Flash allows you to Flash your BIOS from a USB flash drive or HDD from the Smart BIOS screen.

Max overclock

The Advanced menu is where the CPU Configuration, Chipset Configuration, ACPI Configuration, IDE Configuration, PCIPnP Configuration, Floppy Configuration, SuperIO Configuration and USB Configuration menus are located. CPU Configuration is where the various CPU Features are enabled including C1E, Execute Disable Bit and more. Overclocking is done in the Chipset Configuration menu. To Overclock set the Overclock mode to manual or IOT. IOT automatically overclocks the system.

You can change the Base Clock, the PCIE Frequency, the Quick Path Interconnect frequency, the Uncore frequency, the DRAM Frequency and the DRAM Timing various settings. Voltage options include the CPU Voltage, DRAM Voltage, IOH Voltage, VTT Voltage ICH Voltage, IOH CSI Voltage, IOH/ICH PCIE Voltage, CPU PLL Voltage. The IDE Configuration screen is where you set your drives to RAID. Overclocking of the ASRock board was pretty successful. I was able to change the multiplier on the Core i7 920 CPU to 21 and use a clock speed of around 192MHz. This gave a final clock speed of 4034MHz from the default clock speed of 2667MHz, an impressive Overclock of 50% and 1066MHz over the standard clock. The system was totally stable at that clock speed using a high-quality CPU cooler from Thermaltake and had I more time better speeds would have been possible with voltage tweaks.

Bios Screenshots