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 Intel Z77 Express 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 did manage to give me a bit more throughput in basic usage, but since I have a pretty fast connection to begin with, I didn't find much difference when just gaming. What's really nice to see if that you can set priority options for individual applications, so 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 "AXTU", 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 AXTU, with four separate groupings, each with individual controls. AXTU also provides access to XFast RAM, a ramdrive utility that lets you create a ram drive for faster data access. Purchasing other software to do this can be quite expensive, so 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 inprovements, 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.


Here you can see the results with a 5400 RPM 2.5-inch mechanical drive. There's really not much offered in this specific configuration, although the read times are much smoother towards the end of the drive.


When I installed a high bandwdith SSD into my USB 3.0 dock, I found a far different scenario, and noticed a 50 MB/s boost overall as well as an optimized read pattern like with the slower mechanical drive!

Quite a few other OEMs also include USB 3.0 boosting software, that takes advantage of UASP or other similar technologies, but I have found that they aren't enabled by default from system software installation like ASRock's XFast USB is, and since we focus on out-of-the-box performance with board reviews, this difference was very obvious as soon as a USB 3.0 drive was inserted, with the software popping up and asking me to re-plug the drive.
With other options I've seen, you'd never know they were there unless you look for them, so this a very different implementation choice that goes a long way to the benefit of the end-user expereince. I really like that all of this software is up and working by default, and the addition of the ramdrive software, "XFast RAM", is something that really appeals to me on a personal level since my main gaming rig uses a 32 GB G.Skill memory kit, and usually most of that ram would have gone unused, but now I can install a game or two to the ramdrive and get ultra-fast loading times.