BIOS Setup

ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ mainboard doesn’t have any convenient tools with graphics interface for quick BIOS updates, like ASUS or Gigabyte mainboards. However, you won’t need to connect a FDD to reflash the BIOS: all you need is Afuwin utility from Windows OS:

Everything happens very quickly, in full auto ode. I only wish there were an option to save the current BIOS version, just in case.

ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ mainboard uses BIOS based on AMI code. To access the BIOS Setup you have to press F2 instead of the usual Del key. The first page reports the current BIOS version (at the time of tests we used the latest BIOS version P1.30), CPU specifications and its working frequency as well as memory type, capacity and operational frequencies.

The next section is called Advanced and judging by the list of available sub-sections we can guess what its contents are:

We would be primarily interested in checking out the first two sub-sections. Let’s start with CPU Configuration:

Here you can set the desired FSB frequency (100-800MHz) and PCI Express frequency (50-150MHz), adjust the settings for supported processor technologies. The frequencies will be set to their default values in Auto mode. In manual mode you can select the settings yourself. There is also the third mode – I.O.T. (Intelligent Overclocking Technology). It is a sort of dynamic overclocking tool when you can set the desired overclocking goal in percents (maximum 30%), and the CPU will not be overclocked right away but as needed, only if the workload increases. Although we have to admit that although the system did overclock as set, the speed didn’t go down in idle mode, so we couldn’t quite figure out what the difference between this mode and manual overclocking actually was.

Unfortunately, the mainboard doesn’t know to change the processor clock frequency multiplier, and in Auto mode EIST power-saving technology doesn’t work. Even if you manually set Intel SpeedStep tech parameter to Enable, the mainboard will continue to lower the processor clock frequency multiplier in idle mode but will not reduce its Vcore during overclocking. This is when ASUS mainboards acting similarly come to mind: we belief ASROck could have borrowed something better from them than issues like that.

The Chipset Configuration subsection offers us a much broader range of options. Besides adjusting the work modes for integrated audio, networking and FireWire controllers, here we can also set memory frequency and main timings, change the voltages.