Asrock AM2V890-VSTA & MSI K9A Platinum Motherboards

A Closer Look: The Asrock AM2V890-VSTA Bios

As you look at the bios for the Asrock board, there is not a whole lot to write home about. It is simple and straightforward, with little that will confuse the novice, but also little that will get the enthusiast too excited.

Under the advanced page is where we find most of the tweaks that we can use, specifically under the CPU configuration page. Here is a look at the options on that page.

The main interest under the CPU configuration page is that the vcore only goes up to 1.35, which made it very difficult to overclock our 5000+ to very high levels. I am not sure as to why Asrock would limit the vcore to such a low level, but once again we have to remember, this is a budget board.

under the chipset settings page we have our vdimm adjustments, as well as a few other settings, including the HTT divider and bandwidth. Turbo mode and V-link speed did very little for us as far as overall speed of the board was concerned, and in fact, if they were on anything but normal they seemed to hinder the overclocking stability of the board.

Our vdimm options were also pretty much pre-set to 5 different settings, one being auto, and then everything else from Low to Ultra High. I was not really certain as to what voltage was running through the ram, as we will see there is no reading for the ram voltage on the health monitoring page.

Typical setting for the HTT divider: 200-1000, which equals 1x-5x on some boards.

The health page was rather weak, as mentioned there is nothing that tells us what the vdimm is. As you can see, the +3.3v, +5v and +12v rails are reading very low for our Antec power supply.

Like I said, nothing very interesting here. I was disappointed with the vcore and vdimm options that were present on this board. I know it is designed for the budget market, but that is no reason not have a little more control over these settings in the bios.