Installation

No problems with installation. There was plenty of room around the processor socket, and I was able to fit our OCZ Vendetta CPU cooler with no problems. The motherboard has jumpers for selecting FSB. These are located near the 1st PCIe slot. The jumpers must be correctly set for the right type of processor ... it will either be 1066, 1333 or 1600. Selecting the wrong one will make the system fail to boot up.

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Test Setup

Procedures

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS settings first. ALL settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was set to DDR2-800 or DDR3-1066 with the memory timings was set by SPD. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using OCZ DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 2Gb Kit and also Kingston's HyperX DDR3-1800 PC3-14400 2Gb Kit.

Here's a list of software/games we used for benchmarking. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1024x768 with maximum settings turned on (x4 AA and x16 AF)

 - CPU-Z and Everest
 - Science Mark 2
 - PC Mark 05
 - 3D Mark 2005
 - 3D Mark 2006
 - F.E.A.R. (DX9)
 - Call of Juarez (DX10)
 - Crysis (DX10)

Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our operating system.

For overclocking, we manually adjusted various BIOS settings including ram timings, FSB, CPU and DDR voltages. (Please see article index: Overclocking)

The BIOS

The BIOS was easy to use. Here, you can adjust various options including CPU frequencies, FSB, and of course voltages for memory, chipset and processor itself. Memory timings can also be adjusted.

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The BIOS uses ASRock's I.O.T overclocking feature, which I find pretty useless to be honest. You can increase the overall overclock by 30% but it doesn't seem to do much. Manual adjustments also fail to yield any benefits ... except boot failure.