Fan Noise

With only passive cooling this board will be loved by noise-aware computer users. Even under high load there were no chirping sounds coming from the CPU power circuitry power regulation.

Overclocking

How much overclocking would you expect from the names "ASRock" and "ULi" ? After seeing what the BIOS offers, I did not have high hopes for overclocking.

With the latest v1.40 BIOS there we no issues getting to around 275 HTT, but after that, no go. The system would not even POST. At first I suspected the passive cooling on the chipset to be the limiting factor here, so I added an active fan on top of it, this did not do anything to the maximum overclock at all.
I think ASRock deliberately limited the overclock, so that the market share of ASUS' high-end overclocker boards is not touched.

The next step in my quest for 300 MHz x 9 = 2700 MHz was flashing a modded BIOS from OCWorkbench. I used Beta 2. This BIOS comes with a much bigger HTT selection range, no 275 MHz limit, 100 MHz 1:2 memory ratio and better default settings.

Also it changes the "Boot Failure Guard" behaviour. With the original ASRock BIOS the whole CMOS is cleared when the system fails to POST. The modded OCWorkbench BIOS just resets the overclocking related settings like HTT frequency, so you won't have to re-setup every setting in the BIOS.

With this BIOS I could easily get to 295 MHz, but the CPU was unstable beyond that, because the maximum VCore setting available in the BIOS is 1.450V, but my CPU needs 1.5V for 2700 MHz. After doing the CPU VCore voltmod described here, I could easily get the 2700 MHz needed to do the overclocked benchmarks.

Without BIOS limits I was wondering how much HTT the board and chipset can actually do. To make sure that neither the CPU nor the memory are limiting our overclock, the multiplier was set to 4x with a memory divider of 2:1.

After around 350 HTT the board started to act strange. It did no longer reboot properly, even though the rest worked fine. A solution to this was to power it off and power it on again, when it hung/crashed.


A maximum HTT of 380 MHz is very impressive, especially for a low-cost board with ULi chipset which isn't advertised as overclocking king.