Asrock X58 Extreme3 Review
BIOS
Published: 12th May 2010 | Source: Asrock | Price: £180 |
BIOS
The BIOS is the always reliable AMI BIOS we're all very familiar with now. For brevity we'll skip the stuff most people don't care about or is universal and get into the nitty gritty.
There are many ways you can overclock the Asrock Extreme3. We'll look at the in-built options in a second.
The main element you'll probably all use is the manual overclocking mode. This allows you to adjust everything you could possibly desire. The Asrock also comes with the useful "boot failure guard" which will attempt a certain number of boots before restoring previous settings. Very useful when trying to obtain the most out of your setup.
Something we always like to see on overclocking-centric motherboards is anti-Vdroop. The Asrock confusingly names the non-Vdroop setting "without Vdroop" and the setting that allows it to droop, "with Vdroop". There can't be many people who want Vdroop, and as it's a "Vdroop Control" then one would assume it was on or off. Without implies that the Asrock Vdroop control is off. Secondly we'd like for all the BIOS people to get together and decide what they are going to call the QPI voltage setting. Here it's VTT.
Back to the in-built settings. You can overclock your system either based upon CPU speed, or DDR3 speed. Your success is greatly dependant upon the quality of your components, as any overclock is. So if you've got a very bad CPU don't expect the 4.2 setting to bring much success.
All of the various configuration options are handily under one menu which saves a lot of faffing about.
Finally unlike many motherboards that have "load defaults" and "load optimised defaults", Asrock provide us with a multitude of storage based options. Handy for those of you who just like to get up and running with the minimum of fuss.
Most Recent Comments
I agree a floppy and IDE is a bit nuts. the ide i could live with just for moving across old stuff or to use some of the old 750 gigs i have lying around how ever the floppy . that got me scratching my head. Allso why do they have PS2 ports. they could have saved a few quid buy removing all this old gear.
I wasn't to fussed about placement of parts until you said about the small fan. oh dear me comes to mind here.
The sound OH MY OH MY OH MY .. squealing , electrical noise .. oh dear me a throw back to the early days of the first on board sound comes to mind. That is one hell of a major flaw esp since a hell of a lot of people now a days use on board sound. Something doesn't sound rite at all.
ASrock have all ways mixed old and new tech but if the old tech is a bad interference on the new tech then is it a worth while thing to do. All so i noted that the caps next to the ram slots are well to say the least unbelievably close to the ram slots does that cause any problems (just wondering). Ive seen ppl miss when placing ram in there slot and them caps look a little fragile. I could imagine them being ripped off by accident,
Ah well asrock nice try may be a ver 2 would be on the drawing boards pritty much straight away ....
p.s Love the Insta Boot if it works that well.
I do like that instant on feature though. That's pretty cool to get into Windows so fast.
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Originally Posted by name='BloomerzUK'
Probably for people that still flash using floppy maybe?
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Originally Posted by name='Diablo'
The 3D mark scores you get are probably physx enhanced, which won't be the case for these scores. Mine will only hit 35K or so standard. Also, floppy drive, welcome to the 1990s?
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