Board Software

When it comes to software, ASRock really includes a lot, including many things I've never seen before. One thing common to many current Intel products is some form or another of the CFOS network traffic shaping software which ASRock has customized and calls "XFast LAN". I found it works well, and it did manage to give me a bit more throughput in basic usage, but since I have a pretty fast connection to begin with, it didn't do much while just gaming. What's really nice to see is that you can set priority options for individual applications. If you tend to download things while gaming, you can give your games priority manually which does seem to work very well.


For system setting adjustments and system monitoring ASRock includes "FSTU", shown above. There's quite a bit of functionality here and it does work well, while at the same time providing far more monitoring options than what's provided in BIOS. You can also control fan settings from within FSTU, with separate groupings, each with individual controls. FSTU also provides access to XFast RAM, a ram-drive utility that lets you create a ram-drive for faster data access. Purchasing other software to do this can be quite expensive, making this is a nice treat, especially when current Intel enthusiast platforms support 32 GB or more, even at and above 2400 MHz.


To provide further system speed improvements, ASRock also includes "Instant Boot", an optimized sleep functionality that will fully power down the system, while at the same time providing a faster boot than traditional sleep methods as well as lowering garbage data collection. There's also "XFast USB" a utility to speed up USB 3.0 drives that I decided I'd really put to the test while reviewing the Z77 Extreme9, where you can check to see the benefits this software offers.