What? OC software better than doing it in bios?

I never advise noobs to use overclocking software but this one has me scratching my head. ASRock Killer Z270 Sli/ac motherboard.

Board shipped with bios v. 1.10 which was stable but seemed to require more vcore than I would expect at various levels of overclock which, of course, made higher temps. The bios control for the red pulsating LED accent lights was also broken and I found that strobe affect very annoying. It reminded me of a 1970s lava lamp. Remember those?

There was a newer bios on ASRock's website, 1.4 that promised to fix the accent light issue (which it did) but also promised "lower temperatures in bios" whatever that meant. You know how cryptic those manufacturer bios version log notes can be. So I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I installed v. 1.4 via the windows installer and found it to give very unstable boot ups. Boot would often hang before Windows loaded unless the bios was set to Optimized Defaults. Tried various ratios and core voltages and it didn't make any difference. I back flashed to v. 1.10 and the boot problems disappeared. Then I flashed up again to v. 1.4 but this time the flashing was done from bios with a thumb drive. But it made no difference. Lots of boot hangs.

So on a whim I installed the ASRock "A Tuning" utility. I reset bios to Optimized Defaults and started overclocking in Windows with the A Tuning utility. I foud I was indeed needing much lower voltage for the same level of overclock than ws the case with v. 1.10. I noticed that the vcore adjustment in A Tuning was done via "offset" so I went back into bios and switched from "Fixed" CPU voltage mode to "Offset" and applied the same amount of offset I was using in A Tuning. But the boot instability soon returned.

My next strategy was to return bios settings to Optimized Defaults and configure A Tuning to "load at startup" with the overclock parameters. Voila! That was the ticket! No boot hangs, lower voltages and lower temps.

So I am left with the conclusion that bios v.1.4 is buggy and lowers some voltage below the boot up stability threshold when manual settings are used. It should be interesting to see if a future bios release corrects this issue. In the meantime, I have found an effective workaround via the A Tuning utility.

Sounds like your conclusions are correct Trents, as I was reading my head was telling me bad,bad BIOS

Few days ago I just wanted to test OC with Overdrive, who knows same thing might happen lol.

I contacted ASRock support about this issue just a bit ago via online form. If enough people are having this same problem I would think they would look at it.

You know, my PSU is not rated as Haswell compliant. I wonder if that is coming into play here. I thought that issue only related to awaking from sleep states but maybe there is a connection here. I have all the sleep and hibernation stuff turned off in Windows but maybe during the pre windows boot up phase it checks C6 or something.

Punkbuster running on background

Hi Senior Trents,,

I've read from other forum, that is OC software doesn't always working for other software application (or games). For instance, EasyTune 6 cannot be run with Battlefield 2 because it has punkbuster running on background.

Just for your information... And your advise please,, Senior..??

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mdw said:

Hi Senior Trents,,

I've read from other forum, that is OC software doesn't always working for other software application (or games). For instance, EasyTune 6 cannot be run with Battlefield 2 because it has punkbuster running on background.

Just for your information... And your advise please,, Senior..??

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You could be right. I haven't tested that. I don't do much gaming. About the only game I use is Project Cars. It would be easy to test, however, with HWMonitor or some other software that records max and minimum frequencies.

What are you seeking advice for?