Legit Motherboard Reviews
ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard Review
| Manufacturer: | ASRock |
| Product: | ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard |
| Date: | Tue, Aug 31, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Jason Petermann - |
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Bundle and BIOS
ASRock designed a very modern, yet nice looking box for the 880G Extreme3 board. The front of the box proudly displays the things that are included with and on the board, as far as features and software are concerned. This box is much nicer looking in that aspect than others I have seen. There is such a thing as too much and too busy when advertising.
Inside the box we see that ASRock has included several SATA cables, the back I/O plate, the driver CD and some literature for the board.
The BIOS is an AMI Bios and is very easy to navigate, tweak and overclock with. Here we see the main page; that gives basic info on the entire system.
The OC Tweaker page is where every enthusiast will spend the bulk of their time as they attempt to get every ounce of performance available from their system. CPU, memory and voltage settings are all on this page, as we will see.
There are a few auto-overclocking features that will help the beginning overclocking get some mild results. The Turbo 50 is one of those settings...
We also have the ability to load optimized settings ranging from a 5% to a 50% overclock.
You have the same auto-overclocking available for the on-board graphics.
ASRock UCC allows a user that has a CPU with disabled cores to unlock them. We happened to have one of those CPU's in our Phenom X3 processor, and were able to unlock the fourth core... take a look:
Pretty cool stuff to be able to unlock that extra power!
CPU VDDA voltage can be set at either 2.56v or 2.7v.
Vcore goes all the way up to an astounding 2.0v! Plenty of juice there to fry some eggs!
DDR3 clocks can be set at 400, 533, 677 and 800 MHz.
Vdimm has a max setting of 1.995v.
There are two full pages of memory timings that can be set. Lots of tweaking to be done here! This was page one.
And this was page two.
Sideport clock speed can be set to 1640MHz.
HT voltage is selectable up to 1.82v.
1.79v is the limit of the mGPU voltage.
South Bridge voltage has four options for voltage... all the way up to 1.4v.
Sideport voltage has a limit of 1.8v.
PCIE VDDA voltage can be set at either 1.81v or 1.92v.
The North Bridge voltage can be set all the up to 1.55v.
I always have loved the ability to save profiles in the BIOS so that you can quickly switch between overclocking setups. This makes things nice and easy!
We find the USB 3.0 Controller here!
Chipset Settings page.
CPU Configuration page.
The Hardware Monitoring page gives the basic information needed to keep your system safe.
Boot settings page.
We did use the ASRock Instant Flash utility to flash our BIOS and had no issues at all!
Next Page - Test Setup
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard
Page 2 - Board Layout Page 3 - Bundle and BIOS Page 4 - Test Setup Page 5 - Testing Results Page 6 - Power Consumption Page 7 - Overclocking Page 8 - Final Thoughts on the ASRock 880G Extreme3 Motherboard |
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