The BIOS
The ASRock P55 Extreme uses the American Megatrends BIOS, a tabbed BIOS for easy navigation. Start the rig, begin pressing either the “F2” key or the “Del” key about once per second as soon as the ASRock splash screen appears. As the last several ASRock boards, USB is enabled by default, so you can use either USB or PS/2 to navigate the BIOS on the first use.
The BIOS opens to the Main menu, this menu has Date/Time, CPU installed, BIOS version, and memory installed.
The OC Tweaker menu is where all of your overclocking will be done. It is among the simplest overclocking menus I’ve seen, mostly due to the simplicity of the LGA 1156/P55. All settings are on one menu save the memory timings which are in their own submenu, which would clutter up the tweaker menu anyway. The only thing missing is a display showing CPU freq after settings take effect. I will go over the overclock specific features in a bit.
Next is the Advanced menu which contains submenus with other CPU settings and most other settings for the motherboard.
The CPU Configuration submenu contains settings to enable/disable the CPU’s features. It also shows the CPU’s current operating frequency.
The Advanced Chipset submenu contains a few settings as well, but not as many as I am accustomed to seeing.
The H/W Monitor menu shows temps, voltages, and fan speeds. It also contains settings for the motherboard’s fan connectors. Each fan bus is programmable via Intel’s Cool and Quiet.
The Boot menu shows the found drives and contains the Boot Settings Configuration submenu, where the splash screen can be disabled if you hate them like I do.
Overclocking
has overclocking presets called EZ OC, both for the CPU and memory. Though one cancels out the other, either works excellent. Just click on it, choose the CPU speed you desire up to 4.2gHz, and save and exit. Actually, the CPU voltage is a little high and I lowered it some to keep things cooler. I stopped at 4.2, it’s a 40.8% overclock and plenty enough for me.
