ASROCK Mainboard tried to kill my CPU. BIOS completely buggy!
So, I got a new Asrock LifeMixer Z890 mainboard and a Intel 270k CPU.
I never had Asrock bevore, but haven't heard bad things and the board seemed nice and hat lots of USB.
I instaled everything in my case. flashed the newest BIOS and startet the PC for the first time.
All went smooth untill I saw something. I have a seconf 7" Monitor with AIDA 64 that shows all kinds of PC data, like FPS, CPU and GPU speed and temps, and so on. It also shows the CPU VCore.
And yes, its VCore, not input voltage, I checked everything with HWinfo and CPU-Z.
So, I looked at the CCore and under load (Cinebench) it was over 1.5V! Which is dangerous for the CPU and produces a lot of heat and fan noise.
Now I tried to lower the voltage and set an general offset of -70.
Voltage was now a tiny little bit lower (1.48V) but it didn't change much. I tried -100, but nothing changed.
Then I tried a VF curve to lower the cores voltages. Didn't help either. Then I tried offset + VF curve. Nothing.
Next thing, I tried to lower the Power arget and set PL1 and PL2 to 230W and 200W.
Nothing, voltage still at 1.48W.
The last thing I tried was lowering the IA AC Loadline. Standard/Auto was 0.76V.
Description in the BIOS of IA AC Loadline said "accepts numbers between 0 (Auto) and 20!
Wait, what? 20? Why..? How...? I tried to type in some numbers, and true enough, everything between 0 and 20 was accepted by the motherboard, So I typed in 0.60 (accepted) and bootet, just to be greetet with a VCore of fucking 1.66V, which is enough to destroy your CPU. I switched off my PC emediately, and saw that the BIOS had changed my 0.60 to 1.8, resulting in a potentially deadly 1.66 VCore!
Guess I am lucky that my CPU survived.
I later fount out, the only way to lower the voltage is to set a fix cpu voltage, 1.25V worked well, but this isn't a solution for me.
But that wasn't all of the fun. Other erros I have encountered in the BIOS:
- Although I set the time to show the BIOS screen to 10 seconds and my 5080 as primary display adapter, the BIOS emitted no graphic signal, so my monitor switched off. I had to hammer the del key for a minute, then switch my monitor off and on a few times. Most of the time, I would get a BIOS screen then.
Not allways, often I would need 2 or 3 tries to get into BIOS.
The Bios would set certain numbers by itself. Differernt Load Line Calibrations were set to very low/high (low numbers mean high voltage, Asrock logic). I changed the offset from -60 to -70, the BIOS set LLC from 6 to 2.
Bios would change numbers to impossible values.
When you enter a number for an offset, and type something wrong, the BIOS will not change the number to auto, but to -500. Which will not boot, never!
- The most annoying thing: BIOS will choke on RAM training.
So, I overclocked my RAM a little and it worked well for a week. Memtest shows no errors after 10 hours.
Then, I changed something in the BIOS, Ram didn't work anymore. The BIOS wil fail the ram traning, and boot in Safe Mode (inkluding the 1.55V). Again, and again, and again.
If you change back or load the profile that worked for a week.. no luck, it won't boot anymore,
because the BIOS has saved wrong timings and won't change it.
Only chance ist to reset the BIOS via the CLEAR CMOS jumper. I didn't count how often I had to do that.
Sometimes, the PC will work for a week, then suddenly, every boot will fail --> CMOS CLEAR.
In my opinion, something like this shouldn't happen. The BIOS of this board had had 12 updates so far, and it STILL is a complete mess. I will send it back as defect and hope I'll get my money back.
If I'm wrong or made any mistakes, feel free to correct me. I had trouble with this board for over a month now
and I'm done with it. I will get an ASUS board now.
Please excuse my bad English, I am from Germany.