BIOS Rundown

The true test of a motherboard for an overclocker or computer enthusiast is not usually board accessories or features, it is the BIOS and the ability for the board to handle a decent overclock. We will take a closer look at the overclockability of the board in the overclocking section.


The ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi features an AMI 8mb BIOS and supports ACPI 1.1 Compliance Wake Up Events. The splash screen upon POST was pleasing to the eye, but you really need to be paying attention to notice to press F2 instead of the typical delete key to enter the BIOS upon first boot.

One big issue with the stock BIOS was many features were disabled by default. These features include: USB support, LAN, 1394, and HD audio. Using a wireless keyboard and mouse, it was necessary to plug in a PS2 keyboard to enter the BIOS to enable these features. If a user was a novice and was not comfortable navigating a motherboard BIOS, he/she may think the board is defective when the audio, LAN, mouse and other USB devices were not working in Windows.


The PC Health page was consistent with many other boards, showing CPU and motherboard temperatures, fan speeds for the two fan headers, and voltages (vcore, 3.3v, 5.0v, and 12.0v). It would have been nice to see Vdimm and a chipset monitoring setting as the chipset on the board runs very hot, even at stock NB voltage as you will see later.


Overall, the BIOS is quite basic compared to advanced BIOS boards made by DFI and many others, but there are still a few useful overclocking features. First off, overclocking mode must be set to manual and there is an option to choose between CPU, PCI-E Sync or Async. This means the PCI-E bus will increase as FSB increases if the Sync option is selected. Also notable on this screen are CPU Thermal Throttling and Intel Speedstep Technology, both of which are recommended to disable if you want the multi to remain static. The USB configure screen is quite basic but the options must be enabled if using the stock BIOS.


Available RAM timings are simple with the common four CAS,TRCD,TRP,TRAS plus CMD, TRRD, TRC, TWR, and TWTR. CMD rate is a BIOS feature found mainly in 680i chipset boards and allows RAM to run 2T or 1T. One useful setting that is missing here is TRCD, which is important for newer kits of RAM made by MIRA/Powerchip which require higher TRCD to work properly. Another nice feature of the 680i chipset is the ability to run memory Sync or Async to FSB.


The maximum CPU voltage on the board is 1.60v, and unlike most other settings that have a drop-down menu and allow easy voltage selections, the only way to adjust CPU voltage is by pressing + and – on the keyboard. This method is not as convenient and it takes extra time to adjust CPU voltage. DRAM voltage is selectable to 2.66v and should be more than enough voltage for any DDR2.

Northbridge, Southbridge, VTT and GTL Reference voltages are not in fact numeric selectable voltages but rather settings of low, medium, high, and very high. It is a little concerning to not be aware of how much voltage is actually being used in each of the settings and it is recommended to avoid the highest setting altogether to be safe and not risk damaging an expensive CPU.


A setting of interest at the bottom of the overclocking page is Turbo Mode. The BIOS states this setting increases PEG performance. PEG performance refers to the PCI-E Graphics slot performance. In theory this should only speed up the clock crossing process of the PCI-E bus via the MCH to the front side bus of the CPU and memory bus. However, the PCI-E registers in the chipset can be slowed down rather than sped up. Thus, the turbo function is likely the default speed on most boards and using anything else just reduces performance. Upon testing, 3D performance did slightly increase using the Turbo mode; however, in later BIOS versions this setting was removed completely which suggests the above theory was correct.

All in all, the BIOS on this board should appeal to novice overclockers since all of the basic adjustments for minor to mid-range overclocks are there but to be honest, there is isn't much for the enthusiast here. What we do like to see is that ASRock is taking steps for their boards to appeal to a wider market since just a few short months ago we saw ASRock motherboards which offered next to no overclocking options at all. Hopefully this board will be used as a stepping stone for ASRock's foray into more enthusiast-level products in the future.