ASRock P45R2000-WiFi Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

Let’s see how the P45R2000-WiFi lives up to the true test of a board, overclocking! The board is packed with features, uses the latest and greatest chipset, but all that means nothing for an enthusiast if the board does not overclock well. Well we had a lot of trouble trying to overclock this board and we can say it certainly is not user friendly overclocking for a novice user.

First off, using any FSB jumper configuration other than FSB1600 would allow hardly any overclocking at all, maybe 200Mhz at the most if memory was underclocked. Also, with the FSB1333 configuration (which is recommended with a 1333FSB CPU), the board was not even stable at stock with Optimized Defaults and XMP selected. We had to loosen Performance Level to 10 in Windows to have stability at stock. Overclocking FSB by 1 led to insta crash (likely because of strap change and MCH issue common of P45 boards). After several days of tweaking, it was determined that an overclock was possible in FSB1600 mode and we were able to achieve an overclock of 4005Mhz. Benchmarks were possible at 4100Mhz, but for the five hour OCCT test to finish we had to reduce to 4005Mhz.

Testing memory independently, the board was sub par for both DDR2 and DDR3. We were able to run stock on the DDR3 kit (666Mhz 7-7-7-20) but not a Mhz more without memory errors. DDR2 would not even run at stock speeds on any divider and corrupted Windows at only 450Mhz.

We suspect the issues with overclocking on this board are BIOS related. It seems the memory and MCH tables are not set up properly or there is an issue with memory registers as the board showed many symptoms of memory incompatibility. FSB maxed out around 465-470 even using very high for NB and VTT voltages and for 24/7 stability it had to be run closer to 450. One point to mention is GTLREF was best run at the 0.615xVTT setting, this added quite a bit of stability at high FSB.


Even with issues with FSB and memory clocking, a reasonable overclock of 4005Mhz was achieved, a gain of 33%. To accomplish this, the FSB1600 configuration and 3:4 memory divider were used; giving RAM speed of 593Mhz (DDR1186) and 7-6-6-20. It is important to note however that a lot of work went into achieving stability. These settings will be used throughout the benchmarking sections.