BIOS Setup

Now let’s move on to the BIOS Setup of ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard. If you have never worked with an ASRock mainboard before, you may find the BIOS looking a little unusual. And even if you very well familiar with our latest ASRock X58 Extreme review, you will still notice a bunch of differences and changes. These will be the changes for both: better as well as on the contrary. However, the first startup screen that you see on entering the BIOS remained unchanged. Here we set the current date and time and all other parameters tell us the basic system info: BIOS version, CPU and memory specifications.

The second section sued to be “Smart”. Now it is gone and the parameters that belonged there have been distributed over the remaining BIOS sections. I have to say that it is a pity really. It was a disputable solution but I considered it a great idea to single out all options related to the choice of preset operational modes into the second BIOS screen. However, now we see “OC Tweaker” section instead, which contains a lot of parameters essential for proper system configuring, although still not all of them. This is definitely a smart solution: before we used to look for these particular settings deep down in the “Advanced” section.

The first couple of parameters allow overclocking the processor or memory to the preset fixed values. The algorithms are not the best ones: the base clock and voltages will increase, the processor clock multiplier will decrease. This approach may be of interest mostly to commencing overclockers, but we have to keep in mind that automatic overclocking modes like that on all mainboards are a sort of a compromise between simplicity and efficiency that is why they are not perfect. “Intelligent Energy Saver” parameter allows enabling ASRock’s brand name power-saving technologies, but doesn’t allow managing the possible modes. There is a new parameter called “Good Night LED”. If you enable it and the system goes into sleep mode, it promises to turn off not only all onboard LEDs but also the keyboards ones.

“Overclock Mode” parameter by default is set to Auto, but it can be changed to Manual and in this case we will get full access to frequency adjustment options. We can select “I.O.T.” (Intelligent Overclocking Technology) – ASRock’s brand name implementation of automatic overclocking technology. When the processor load rises, the base and PCI Express bus frequencies will increase by the set number in the interval from 0 to 10%. Moreover, “Overclock Mode” parameter may also be set to Optimized, but there is no mention of this mode anywhere in the manual that comes with the board. It is a little strange to see that “Boost Failure Guard” parameter is enabled by default. It would be logical to enable it only when some non-standard or overclocking-related modes are selected.

The next group of parameters allows changing the processor clock frequency multiplier, QPI and memory bus frequencies. The settings related to memory timings have all be moves to a separate page.

Another group of parameters within “OC Tweaker” section deals with the voltages. There is an option protecting against processor voltage drop under heavy load. All high values are highlighted with a warning red color. Overclocking fans should be pleased with the ability to set processor Vcore at a fixed value or just add a certain value to the nominal setting if the “CPU Voltage” parameter has been switched to “Override Offset”. In the latter case you can overclock the processor with all Intel power-saving technologies up and running even if the CPU core voltage has been increased. We have already seen this functionality by Asus P7P55D Deluxe mainboard, while Gigabyte solutions, unfortunately, do not know how to do it yet.

The last group of parameters in the “OC Tweaker” section has come here from the “Exit” section, but I disapprove of this change. At first glance it seems reasonable and useful to have the ability to save three complete BIOS settings profiles as soon as you made all the changes you wanted. However, this is not a universal section, some of the important settings are missing. So, once you have adjusted them to your liking in other sections, you will have to go back to “OC Tweaker”. You may face additional problems trying to restore the saved settings. Before, all you needed to do was to press the left arrow key in the BIOS in order to get to the “Exit” section and choose the desired profile. Now you will have to go all the way down the relatively long “OC Tweaker” section. All in all, I am not totally against this change, but it seems to me not very well thought-through. This change makes working with profiles harder rather than easier. However, I have to stress a great new option that allows giving the saved profiles their own unique names that will remind you of their contents.

The next section after “OC Tweaker” is “Advanced”. It consists of several sub-sections.

“CPU Configuration” sub-section offers basic CPU info and allows configuring processor technologies. Namely, the functionality of this particular sub-section is exactly what’s missing in the above discussed “OC Tweaker”.

Let’s not dwell on the pretty obvious features of other sub-sections in “Advanced” and focus only on the unique BIOS reflashing system called “ASRock Instant Flash”. It scans the storage media connected to the mainboard automatically and offers to update the BIOS if it finds a suitable BIOS image.

This system does have a few drawbacks. For example, you can’t save the current BIOS version. Besides, the utility could be a little more informative. In this respect Asus mainboards are still the best: they will tell you the date and version number of your current BIOS and will tell you the number of the BIOS version you are trying to reflash. However, “ASRock Instant Flash” is faster and easier to work with than any other similar utilities out there.

“H/W Monitor” section boasts rather modest functionality. The only thing we really liked here is that you can not only set the processor fan rotation speed in dependence on the CPU temperature, but also lock the rotation speeds of three other fans at desired values.

You can set the boot-up device order in the “Boot” section, but this is no unique feature, many mainboards have it. The remarkable thing about this section is that you can not just enable or disable the startup logo, but even pick one of the three available images to your liking.

It turned out that from now on you can select one of the preset operational modes in the “Exit” section. Moreover, there is enough room in this section to also place the options for BIOS settings profiles saving and loading.

Overall, if we try to estimate the success of ASRock P55 Deluxe BIOS functionality, we can conclude that it is quite good. There are a number of questionable solutions, but there is nothing dramatically bad. We see some definite improvements since the time we last talked about ASRock mainboards. For example, you can now provide the settings profiles with their own names. So, we must give ASRock P55 Deluxe high score for the BIOS implementation. In fact, knowing that some of these features are working incorrectly, we felt inclined to lower this score right away, but we decided to play by the rules. You don’t know anything yet about the way ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard actually works, and I will pretend that I don’t know either. As a result, this board gets a B+ of the theoretical BIOS features, but we are still going to talk about the way these features work later on.