ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2

BIOS:

Moving directly into the BIOS, ASRock continues to go with American Megatrend's (AMI) v02.58 BIOS template. The pages available are main, advanced, hardware monitor, boot, security, and exit. As usual, ASRock makes very few modifications to the BIOS and leaves out many enthusiast options found on other motherboards. The BIOS version loaded on our motherboard, and used throughout testing, was M0.007 Revision 1. Moving to the CPU configurable options from the advanced page, the CPU frequency can be adjusted from 100MHz to 300MHz, and Boot Failure Guard and Hyper Threading can be altered. The CPU multiplier is also displayed, however, in our instance of using a Pentium 4 530 the option was dimmed out so we were unable to adjust the actual value. On the Chipset page, the DRAM frequency is limited to 200MHz (DDR2-400) and 266MHz (DDR2-533). Other options as far as the memory specifications go is adjusting the CAS latency, RAS to CAS delay, RAS precharge, and RAS active to precharge. The PCI Express frequency has configurable options of automatic and manual, from 50MHz to 200MHz. Moving onto voltage adjustments, the DDR2 memory has options of high, medium, and low while the VDDQ Northbridge and Southbridge are limited to high and low. In the default BIOS, there are no options for simply altering the CPU voltage level. One of the previously mentioned features with the 775XFire-eSATA2 is its Untied Overclocking Technology, which according to ASRock documentation simply means during overclocking, the front side bus enjoys a better margin due to a fixed PCI bus. Of course, having a fixed PCI bus is not anything incredibly new or rare, although it may lead to a more stable overclocking environment it is simply a matter of how far we will be able to push the motherboard with its limited voltage abilities. On the hardware monitoring page, the CPU and motherboard temperatures are displayed in Celsius and Fahrenheit, as well as the CPU and chassis fan speeds, and voltages. The voltages are monitored for the VCore, +3.3V, +5.00V, and +12.00V.