BIOS Setup

ASRock X58 Extreme, just like its predecessor, uses a BIOS on AMI micro-code. The BIOS looks and functionality are very similar to what we already know from our ASRock X58 SuperComputer review. However, we also noticed a few evident improvements and a number of completely new functions in it.

After the “Main” section that has nothing special about it and reports the basic info about the current operational modes, we go straight to “Smart” section:

We would like to once again thank ASRock for making it possible to choose HDD operational modes quickly and easily and for giving us the ability to enable power-saving technologies in “Smart Settings” sub-section. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the use of optimized parameters didn’t cause failure to boot, like the one we observed on ASRock X58 SuperComputer. A couple of parameters from “EZ Overclocking” sub-section will allow you to increase the memory or processor frequency.

We have already seen all this when we talked about ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. But it is for the first time that we come across the integrated utility for updating the BIOS called ASRock Instant Flash. It works in a very interesting and original way. The utility scans all connected storage devices and offers to update the BIOS only if it finds a suitable BIOS version for this specific mainboard. As a result of this truly innovative approach we no longer need to search for the necessary BIOS file on our own. We have never seen an implementation like that anywhere else. It is very convenient.

The BIOS updating procedure itself is pretty traditional:

Here I would also like to say that you can download a file for BIOS Updating from Windows from ASRock’s official web-site. Just extract files from the archive and launch Afuwin utility. After rebooting your system your mainboard will have an updated BIOS version. Also an extremely convenient feature.

The next section we would like to go to is called “Advanced” and it contains a few important sub-sections for proper system configuring.

“CPU Configuration” sub-section offers basic info about the processor and allows configuring different processor technologies.