BIOS


To enter the BIOS one has to simply press F2 during POST, wait for the system to finish its initialization and then you are greeted to a fairly limited, yet simple BIOS menu. However, the BIOS is the one area where this ASRock motherboard falls short. Once again ASRock as continued its tradition of using an American Megatrend BIOS that is extremely limited in its scope, features and options. The upside to this is that it is fairly simple and not overly complex. This can be considered a good thing if this is your first board and you have very little or no experience, as it will be difficult to hurt or damage your computer with a wrong setting.


On the downside its BIOS is can be considered very restrictive and is not very precise in its limited number of available adjustments. While I certainly was not expecting to see a BIOS where you can tweak just about anything and increase voltages in .1v increments; it was rather disheartening to see that the adjustments were not labeled in standard, concise terminology. Rather this board’s BIOS uses terms like “High”, “Middle”, “Low” and “Lowest” to describe important settings like RAM voltage. According to the manual high equals 1.99v, middle equals 1.90v, low is 1.81 and lowest equates to 1.71volts. Special consideration should be taken in selecting RAM for this unit as some higher end DDR2 RAM will only work properly at 2.1 volts, which this board is incapable of providing.


What was worse than this imprecise terminology is the inability to adjust CPU voltage. There is no option allowing you to increase core voltage above stock. So unless you are willing to do a “Conroe voltage pin mod” that involves connecting pairs of contacts on the bottom of your CPU, this board is will not overclock very well. There are even reports that this modification does not even work on p31 motherboards. This lack of options means you will only get what ever your CPU can take at completely stock voltages. It is easy to understand why this is done, and this is certainly not the first ASRock board to do this, it is just puzzling why they will give RAM voltage adjustment options (albeit in a very crude, imprecise way) but not CPU voltage adjustment. Hopefully, ASRock’s next board will remedy this oversight. On the positive side this board supports FSB speeds of up to 500mhz in 1mhz increments; so future CPU upgrades should be fairly painless.



All these BIOS quirks can be considered minor annoyances and as this board is geared towards the entry level market allowances have to be made. What cannot be overlooked is the fact that while this board advertises DDR2 533 support, you have to manually set jumpers on the motherboard to use it. In the BIOS your only options are “333” or “400”. This IS a budget level board and while PC2-5300 and PC2-6400 are reasonably priced PC2-4200 is very reasonably priced. We can honestly not remember the last time we had to set jumpers on a motherboard to specify ram speed. While we can understand why the BIOS is purposely restrictive we can not imagine why this oversight was allowed to make it onto a retail board, especially a board that is in the hundred dollar price range.

Before continuing I would also like to mention the sometimes puzzling behavior this board exhibited. When saving and exiting the BIOS, the system would immediately shutdown. This behavior was faster than expected but not overly disconcerting. What was disconcerting was approximately once every ten or twelve exits from BIOS the system would appear to “hang” for upwards of 30 or more seconds before rebooting normally. Luckily, we were patient enough to wait for it to reboot itself and that it did not do this the first time we exited the BIOS. It was completely random in nature and continues to do this to us to this day.


Even more puzzling was the fact that there is no true “factory reset” option in the BIOS. There is a “load optimal bios settings” option BUT this option turns of not only all USB & 1394 connectivity but also you LAN port as well. To me this is a less than optimal option, and can be very frustrating if you are unaware of its behavior. No one likes resetting the BIOS to factory before upgrading the CPU just to find that their mouse and network no longer work.