BIOS Walkthrough

Although these images might seem quite similar to those of other ASRock boards I've covered recently, I am happy to see it done this way, since I like ASRock's UEFI, and the familiar layout made it quite easy to find exactly what I needed.


When it comes to options, there are definitely enough, but when it comes to navigating those options, the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 makes things a bit difficult with the way in which the cursor moves through the menus. You have to manually go all the way back up to the top after reaching the bottom. Pressing the down arrow on the bottom of each page of the Fatal1ty X79 Champion's Bios would, on the other hand, take you back to the top. It's a small thing, but it's something that frustrated me to no end while trying to overclock.


Otherwise, I really got to give ASRock a bit of credit here. Voltage ranges offered are a bit more diverse than other products and memory timings are equally plentiful, and they are all 100% effective.


There are options to disable onboard LEDs in both the Power and Reset-switch menu. The ability to turn off the dual-digit LED display frustrated me a bit as these options are by default set to disable all the lights, but having the POST code reader LED up is pretty critical during testing!


Pretty much everything is very well organized, although I had performance issues at first. I found options for the SATA controllers on their own page, which actually makes more sense to me than grouping the SATA controllers up with all the other devices.


The ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 also includes the ability to update the BIOS over the internet while still sitting in the BIOS. This little innovation is something I've not seen anywhere else. A page with options also allows you to select which global region you want to download the BIOS from, and you can update from a file on a USB stick or within Windows. I really like what ASRock offers here. I also found space to store three BIOS profiles for quick overclocking changes; every setting of a profile carries over perfectly, even after clearing the CMOS.


The ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 offers a bit more upon exiting the BIOS, including the option to discard changes rather than just resetting to the defaults. You can click on this singular option to get everything back if you had a good overclock, changed an option, and concluded that you should not have made that change.

ASRock has a pretty good UEFI BIOS. Scrolling through the menus could be done better, and a couple more voltage monitoring options might be nice, but there is, other than that, not a lot here I'd like to change. I used a wide variety of memory modules during testing, and they all worked flawlessly. I noticed that enabling XMP settings had the board following the memory stick's SPD profile to the letter, something some other boards do not even support in the first place. Considering how functional and, also, how inexpensive this board is, I really do not expect a lot from the BIOS, but the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 did deliver far more than I had expected.