ASRock P67 Extreme6 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1155 by stefan @ 2011-02-03

The Extreme6 P67 motherboard from ASRock is one of their high-end products for the Sandy Bridge CPUs and features a 16+2 Power Phase Design, along with a decent software+hardware bundle.

  • prev
  • next

Extreme6 UEFI Explored

The new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) from ASRock looks much better that the previous generation BIOS, and it comes with a green/blue/grey theme; the main BIOS sections are represented with buttons on the top side of the interface and the current date/time is shown in the bottom right portion of the screen.

The Main section contains information regarding the currently installed UEFI version, the CPU name along with its rated speed, the current processor speed, microcode update, the CPU cache size, total memory installed and how the memory is distributed in the slots:

 

 

 

The OC Tweaker is the most interesting section of the UEFI, because here we can modify the CPU multiplier (if we do own a K series CPU), set custom voltages, memory timings or even save our settings in 3 different slots; in the first section we can also observe the Internal PLL Overvoltage option, which allows better CPU Turbo Ratio overclock capability with D2 stepping CPUs, the fully adjustable power throttle (we can customize both short and long power duration limits) or the Core Current Limit:

 

 

Further down, we can set advanced memory timings, or we can simply enable the embedded XMS profile:

 

 

Next, we can set various voltages like Vcore, DRAM voltage, PCH, PLL, VTT (VCCIO), VCCSA or select the Load-Line Calibration levels. The modifications we've made can be saved with the name of our choice. I have seen that the save and load time of the profiles is much, much faster compared to the ones in BIOSes:

 

 

The Advanced section contains some more sub-menus that we can configure:

 

 

In the CPU Configuration sub-menu, we can set how many CPU cores we want enabled, enable disable the Hardware Prefetcher or the Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch function; the CPU Thermal Throttling can be enabled or disabled from the same menu, along with the Intel Virtualization or No-Execute Memory Protection:

 

 

In the North Bridge Configuration sub-menu, we can customize the Low MMIO resources alignment, the Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O can be enabled or disabled and we can also specify which will be the first Primary Graphics Adapter to initialize:

 

 

In the South Bridge Configuration sub-menu, we can enable/disable some of the onboard chips, like LAN 1/2, Firewire, HD audio or we can enable/disable the Front Panel audio:

 

  • prev
  • next
Comment from jmke @ 2011/02/05
With 6 none-affected SATA ports on this board, I'd say this product should be on your shortlist
Comment from Dave65 @ 2011/02/06
Well this was on my short list,had it one week and it or the CPU died.It shut off out of the blue and the only thing that would run is the fans,with code 19 on the display..Was a nice looking board,I really liked it..

 

reply