The Bios
Just like the bundle, there is not alot of fanfare with the bios that is on these mATX boards. Remember though, these boards are designed for HTPC and budget systems, so there is not alot of need for a multitude of bios tweaks. With that being said, I still think there are a few small things that ASRock could do to increase the appeal of these boards. Let's look at the bios.
The hardware monitor page gives us just a small look into the health of the system. We have our CPU and motherboard temps, fan speeds, and just a few voltages that are monitored.
The Advanced page is where we will spend the rest of our time in this bios. Specifically, we will look at the CPU configuration page for the few tweaks that are available.
The CPU configuration page gives us the option to tweak a few thingssuch as our CPU multiplier, vcore, DDR divider and some pcie options.
A closer look reveals that we have options of 400/533/667/800 for our DDR dividers. Unfortunately, we do not have any DDR voltage adjustments on this board. That makes overclocking your ram just a tad difficult on this board.
As we look at the FSB options, we see that ASRock has adjustments up to 400fsb. This is certainly more than enough, which we will explain more as we look at the overclocking of this board in just a bit.
As far as voltages go, there are very little options available on this board. The CPU goes up to a whopping 1.35v for this 5000+. We need at least 1.4v to reach overclocking levels of over 3.0Ghz on this CPU, which we have done on several other boards.
A look at the vdimm options and you can see why we would say that there is really not much as far as options are concerned. We have no idea what the actual voltages would be for each setting. I do know that we had to move it to at least HIGH to get SuperPi to run at all.
There is really no surprise to hear that this bios is very boring. It is not meant to be a tweakers delight. This is a simple board with simple settings at a simple price. Let's move on.
