Rebooting the system one more time just to
see the right timing seems to be inconvenient. Hopefully, it is just a
temporary flaw need to be corrected rather than a mean solution.
Let’s talk about the fan regulation ability
of the mainboard. The mainboards from ASRock and Gigabyte still keep the
capability to adjust the rotation speed of CPU’s fan with 3-pin connections. Other
manufacturers eliminated this capability of their products long time ago, so we
always keep mentioning this fact in our reviews. We also used to criticize
ASRock to let their mainboards slowly react with the variation of the CPU’s
temperature. It is a software downside as the rotation speed of the fan can
still be adjusted, like what we saw in our test of the ASRock Z77 OC Formula
mainboard. The latter one comes with the bundle of Formula Drive utilities used
for adjusting the fans’ speed. After being adjusted, the fan speed is almost
perfectly synchronized with the temperature. The speed is low when the system
is idle, so the device is quiet, but the fans quickly react with the rise of
CPU loads. However, ASROck provide another tool for its mainstream mainboard
(which is called the ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility), which is lacks of
adjustments, so you have to suffer from the a relatively long delay whenever
there is any change in CPU loads and temperature as well as when the mainboard
react towards those changes.
the
ASRock Z77 OC Formula mainboard
We do not really want to focus on these
worries because they might turn out to be an advantage in some cases. The quick
reaction of the mainboard to any change in CPU loads might cause a sudden
change in noise level, which might be annoying. The ASRock mainboard, on the
contrary, prefer a slow and steady change, so this adjustment is rather
suitable, unless the loads are too high. We even used the automatic regulation
during testing the overclocking process, after increasing the minimum fan’s
speed limit in BIOS. However, it is impossible for ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 to
automatically adjust the rotation speed of its fans. Opposite to ASUS’s
mainboard, it allows reducing one 3-pin fan’s rotation seed but the speed will
be consistent regardless of the temperature and CPU loads.
Operating at the nominal setting is quite
acceptable as we used a high-performance cooler called Notua NH-D14. We,
however, had to increase the rotation speed manually to the maximum level as it
is impossible for the mainboard to do it itself. We are not really worried
about the CPU as we do not know the exact temperature. AMD never implements or
adjusts the fan sensor in their Socket FM2 processors. We were informed about
the high temperature of the heatsink mounted over the voltage regulator components,
though. At the high and heavy operational loads, it exceeded 60°C. Although it
was far from the critical level, that temperature was recorded at the maximum
rotation speed of the CPU’s fans (which also cooled the VRM heatsink) and such
temperature was not caught in any other mainboards.
Despite few nuances mentioned above, there
is no shortage occurring when the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 worked at the nominal
settings as well as overclocking settings. Just like two mainboards which we
reviewed on previously, it helped us to push the GPU clock rate to 1085MHz, CPU
clock rate to 4.5GHz and memory clock rate to 1867 MHz. The memory timings were
also adjusted.
There
was almost no shortage occurring when the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 worked at the
nominal and overclocking settings
Everything is just similar to other
mainboards, except for the idle mode. The Cool ’n’ Quiet technology is switched
off when CPU of the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 is overclocked. As the result, the
frequency multiplier is decreased, just the same in the nominal mode, but the
voltage is not reduced as it is still high.
Everything
is just similar to other mainboards, except for the idle mode
To put everything of this part in to a
nutshell, we would like to clarify that we do not recommend overclocking Socket
FM2 CPUs. As we explained in the review about the Gigabyte GA –F2A85XX-UP4, the
power consumption of the system does not increase much when we increase the
clock rate of the integrated GPU, but this increase is permanent and fixed in
the idle mode. A performance reduction in computing manipulation might be the
result of this overclocking, and still there is no obvious benefit in favor of
the computing tasks, and for the 3D and gaming applications, it is rather
useless. Therefore, we suggest that do not overclock the CPU, as well as x86
and graphics core, but we really appreciate increasing the clock rate. This
does not affect the power that the computer draws, but will have a positive effect
on every application performance, especially games.
We just overclocked all system components
in our tests as we would like to check all capability of the tested mainboard. Our
review would not be completed if it is lack of the information on overclocking.
Moreover, overclocking process helps checking the mainboard effectively. If
working with non-standard settings causes no problem in the operation for the
mainboard, we can conclude that it is surely stable and works well in the
nominal mode for a long time. Overclocking all components is not a purpose but
a means to test the mainboard in all aspects. Therefore, once again, we would
like to recommend you to overclock the system memory only on the Socket Fm2
platform and set other clock rates at the nominal values.
