ASRock P67 Extreme4 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1155 by stefan @ 2011-01-22

The Extreme4 P67 motherboard from ASRock is a feature-rich product which incorporates the latest technologies like USB 3.0/SATA3/eSATA3, supports the Sandy Bridge CPUs from Intel and comes with a very easy to use UEFI BIOS; the motherboard comes with a 8+2 power phase design and is offered at a competitive price. In this review we use the board to push our 2500K CPU to 4.8Ghz with air cooling.

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Extreme4 UEFI BIOS Explored

The new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) from ASRock looks much better that the previous generation BIOS, and it comes with a green/blue/grey theme; the main BIOS sections are represented with buttons on the top side of the interface and the current date/time is shown in the bottom right portion of the screen.

The Main section contains information regarding the currently installed UEFI version, the CPU name along with its rated speed, the current processor speed, microcode update, the CPU cache size, total memory installed and how the memory is distributed in the slots:

 

 

 

The OC Tweaker is the most interesting section of the UEFI, because here we can modify the CPU multiplier (if we do own a K series CPU), set custom voltages, memory timings or even save our settings in 3 different slots; in the first section we can also observe the Internal PLL Overvoltage option, which allows better CPU Turbo Ratio overclock capability with D2 stepping CPUs, the fully adjustable power throttle (we can customize both short and long power duration limits) or the Core Current Limit:

 

 

 

Further down, we can set advanced memory timings, or we can simply enable the embedded XMS profile:

 

 

 

Next, we can set various voltages like Vcore, DRAM voltage, PCH, PLL, VTT (VCCIO), VCCSA or select the Load-Line Calibration levels. The modifications we've made can be saved with the name of our choice. I have seen that the save and load time of the profiles is much, much faster compared to the ones in BIOSes:

 

 

 

 

The Advanced section contains some more sub-menus that we can configure:

 

 

 

In the CPU Configuration sub-menu, we can set how many CPU cores we want enabled, enable disable the Hardware Prefetcher or the Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch function; the CPU Thermal Throttling can be enabled or disabled from the same menu, along with the Intel Virtualization or No-Execute Memory Protection:

 

 

 

In the North Bridge Configuration sub-menu, we can customize the Low MMIO resources alignment, the Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O can be enabled or disabled and we can also specify which will be the first Primary Graphics Adapter to initialize:

 

 

 

In the South Bridge Configuration sub-menu, we can enable/disable some of the onboard chips, like LAN, Firewire, HD audio or we can enable/disable the Front Panel audio:

 

 

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Comment from thorgal @ 2011/01/23
Neatly done Stefan.

Also like your screenshots : which hard/software do you use for making the bios screen shots ?
Comment from jmke @ 2011/01/23
read last page first paragraph, bold part
Comment from thorgal @ 2011/01/23
Completely read over it lol.

Bios shots without some special hardware are a bit of a pain usually.
Comment from geoffrey @ 2011/01/23
via tv-out > tv-capture card you should also be able to do so
Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2011/01/23
Thanks for the appreciation! Really like the new UEFI and its screenshot feature.
Comment from jmke @ 2011/01/23
Quote:
Originally Posted by geoffrey View Post
via tv-out > tv-capture card you should also be able to do so
how do you tell BIOS to output image over TV-out? it defaults to the HDMI/D-SUB/DVI connector

HDMI capture card would be better

 

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