ASRock A780FullDisplayPort Motherboard

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 77%       Manufacturer: ASRock

BIOS

ASRock uses the same Award BIOS layout that ASUS uses; the same tab menu system with the grey background. I personally find this BIOS a bit daunting as you have to go looking through quite a few sub menus to locate all the overclocking features, which can be annoying compared to companies like GIGABYTE and MSI who have them all in one menu.

In order to find the overclocking settings you have to navigate to the Advanced tab and sift though about four sub menus to find all the tweaking options; not a productive layout.

Buses

CPU Frequency: 150MHz – 500MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCIe Frequency: 75MHz to 200MHz in 1MHz Increments

Voltages

CPU Voltage: 0.0v to 1.55v in 0.0125v Increments

NB Voltage: 0.0v to 1.55v in 0.0125v Increments

DRAM Voltage: 1.8v to 2.2v in 0.1v Increments

Chipset Core Voltage: 1.1v – 1.2v in o.1v Increments

PCIe Voltage: Auto – 1.8 or 1.9v

Overclocking

While having a few options on the board, the AMD 780G chipset didn’t yield much luck. In fact, speeds above 210MHz were impossible due to limited multiplier control of the Upstream and Downstream links. So, overclocking was eliminated from these tests.

We must stress however that this board is not a performance piece, but is aimed at the HTPC and Digital Home environments where silence is the key and digital content is the aim.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren’t able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. “Burn-in” time might also come into play if you believe in that.