ASRock 890GX Extreme 4 Motherboard - BIOS and Overclocking
ASRock 890GX Extreme 4 BIOS:
The motherboard BIOS is probably one of the most boring areas to look at if you're not an overclocker or enthusiast. Mainstream users will probably want to skip down to the overclocking section to find out if this Extreme board is extremely easy to tweak. For you hardcore users, check out the BIOS screenshots of the original 1.00 BIOS below. Although this board has been out a little while, the latest BIOS is still the one that shipped with it, and to be honest, we had no issues at all. SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 seem to be nice and speedy as you'll see on the following pages. We've included some of the BIOS screens below and you should find almost everything you're looking for. Some sections like "Boot Order" have been left out as we simply can't handle that much excitement. For now, the OCTweaker section and advanced BIOS settings will have to keep you happy - and tweaking your RAM, CPU and voltages until your heart's content.
 BIOS - OCTweaker 1 |
 BIOS - OCTweaker 2 |
 BIOS - OCTweaker 3 |
 BIOS - OCTweaker Memory Timings |
As you can see, there are a lot of settings to tweak, overclock and manually adjust almost every aspect of this board. This is a far cry from the days of old, when only ultra-high-end boards had these features. In terms of voltage adjustments, the 890GX has a wide range of available adjustments - most in small increments. It is interesting to see that some of the incremental adjustments vary throughout the voltage range.
- RAM Speed Selection - 800MHz to 1600MHz
- RAM Voltage - 1.250v - 2.065v in 0.005v or 0.010v increments
- Sideport Clock Speed - 533MHz - 1700MHz
- Sideport Voltage - 1.1v to 1.4v in 0.1v increments
- HT Voltage - 1.2v to 1.8v in 0.1v increments
- NB Voltage - 1.11v - 1.795v in 0.010v - 0.015v increments
- SB Voltage - 1.1v - 1.4v in 0.1v increments
- CPU VDDA Voltage - 2.56v or 2.7v
- PCIe VDDA Voltage - 1.81v or 1.92v
- CPU Voltage - 0.6v to 1.925v in 0.0125v increments
- CPU NB Voltage - 0.6v to 1.925v in 0.0125v increments
Overclocking:
Just as in all of our
motherboard reviews,
we tried to max out the bus and reduce the multiplier in order to
achieve the highest bus possible. I soon discovered 6-Core AMD Phenom II CPUs don't have a lot of overclocking headroom as the bus topped out
somewhere between 225MHz and 232MHz. We were able to run at 230MHz rock
stable, but we didn't get a lot of extra performance with this
setting. With all cores enabled, we managed to hit just over 3.2GHz no matter how we sliced it. We also took a screenshot of the integrated GPU as well.
 CPU-Z |
 GPU-Z |
On the next page we'll start testing out the board and dive into the HDD and Network subsystems before we get into overall performance testing.
