BIOS

What I really love about this BIOS is that it boots so extremely fast. You can barely see the POST screen. When the SATA RAID BIOS is disabled, the system starts loading your operating system after about four seconds.


ASRock uses an AMI BIOS. The main page shows some general info about the motherboard, which BIOS version is installed and if the memory is running in dual-channel mode.


The first page is called Advanced and is home to many sub-pages. All important things are grouped together here.

CPU Configuration

On the CPU Configuration page you can tweak the rather few overclocking options.


You can select "Auto", which runs your CPU at its default clock or you decide to do manual overclocking - make sure you select Async if you overclock. With Async your PCI-Express bus speed stays at 100 MHz, no matter what you set the HTT to.

What I found very odd at first, is how you change the CPU Frequency value. You can either use + or - on the numeric keypad to change the value or type in the numbers right after navigating to the option. Pressing the enter key or page up / page down or + / - does not do anything when this entry is highlighted.
The frequency range of 140 MHz to 300 MHz might not sound that bad at first (I like the underclocking part). But unfortunately with the official BIOSes you can not reach higher than 275 MHz stable.


While the CPU multiplier setting shows you a lot of multipliers, the higher-than-default ones do not work. This is a CPU limitation, it's just that ASRock shows all multipliers here and does not ask the CPU which multipliers it actually supports.


The CPU voltage selection is also quite limited. The highest setting is CPU default + 0.05V, for the Athlon64 Venice 1.450V. Not enough to do some serious overclocking. Doing a voltmod to increase the CPU voltage is quite easy and outlined here.

Memory voltage is changed on the Chipset Configuration page.

Memory Timings

When overclocking, it is best to manually set your memory frequency. The available options here are 200 MHz (1:1), 166 MHz (5:6) and 133 MHz (2:3). A tweaked BIOS (see the overclocking section of this review) also enables 100 MHz (1:2).

You can change CAS Latency (tCL), Active-to-Precharge Delay (tRAS), Ras-to-Cas Delay (tRCD), and RAS Precharge Time (tRP), which are the standard timings for memory modules, there are many many more settings to tweak in the Athlon64 memory controller, but they are not listed here. At least the BIOS has settings to change the more expert settings 1/2T Memory Timing, Read Preamble value and Async Latency value.