ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+

BIOS:

While the 4Core1600P35-WiFi+ motherboard brings several changes on the ASRock front, an AMI (American Megatrends Inc) BIOS is still used. The BIOS version used during testing was M0.27D. The BIOS settings were ho-hum and accompanied by limited options for overclocking, which isn't surprising for an ASRock motherboard. The CPU frequency range is from 90MHz to 800MHz and there is manual CPU voltage control, but no bounds were specified when using an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor. The DRAM voltage can go up to 2.72V while the northbridge, southbridge, and VTT had voltage options of auto, low, middle, high, and highest. From this area, there is also an option for controlling the ASRock WiFi TX strength. The options for the WiFi strength were auto, low, normal, high, and ultra high. From the hardware health event monitoring area, the CPU and motherboard temperatures are displayed as well as the fan speeds and Vcore, +3.30, +5.00, and +12.00 voltages.

Overclocking:

ASRock motherboards have long been known as one of the brands to stay clear from if you are an overclocker, but with a new OC Tuner feature, they seem to be dipping further into the enthusiast world. ASRock's OC Tuner is a graphical-based overclocking tool that runs within Windows and is similar to the utilities from other motherboard vendors. Among these features include CPU/PCI frequency control, voltage control, hardware monitoring (temperature, voltage, fan speed), and tuning other options. Unfortunately, ASRock's OC Tuner is available only for Microsoft Windows operating systems at this time. However, even with the limited overclocking options from the BIOS we still had achieved a nice overclock for a budget ASRock motherboard. With no trouble, at all we had pushed an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 to 2.625GHz.