Software & Lighting
Once you get your system up and running the first piece of software you are going to want to download is ASRock’s App Shop. This piece of software has their Live Update built in so all you have to do is download this software and it will automatically download all of your drivers and even update your BIOS to the latest version.
ASRock’s motherboard companion software is called A-Tuning, it really has not changed much over the past few years. When you first open it up you are brought to the Operation Mode tab, on it you can set a “Performance Mode”, “Standard Mode”, or a “Power Saving Mode”.
The next tab is OC Tweaker. Here you can easily overclock and tune your system within Windows. You can change your CPU speed, voltages, memory settings and more.
In the System Info tab you get a live view of your CPU Speed, temperatures, fan speeds, and voltages.
FAN-Tastic tuning allows you to set custom fan curves for your CPU fan as well as all of the other fan headers on the board. You can also run a fan test which will auto-tune your fans.
To control the lighting on the board you need to use ASRock’s Polychrome Sync software, which oddly enough does not show up in the App Shop, you’ll have to go to the ASRock website to download it. When you open it up you can select the LED section or header and choose its mode / effect. There is also a color-wheel to set your colors. It would be nice to have an RGB input so you can match colors correctly.
The RGB lighting on this board is really good. Your have RGB lighting on the I/O cover as well as around the chipset heatsink. It is addressable RGB too so you can do cool effects like the rainbow wave etc.
