Asrock B85 Anniversary BIOS issues

My experience with G3258s is different than yours, but the last one I bought is about six months old now.

The first one I have starts to hit its wall at 4.0GHz. Above that it needs over 1.3V to boot and be stable at 4.1 - 4.2GHz. 4.5GHz is virtually impossible, it would need 1.4V+ to boot. So I gave up on that one.

The second one I bought, months later, is much better. It will do 4.5GHz at 1.2V and is stable and works great.

One thing I "discovered", although it really is obvious and nothing new, is this. Running at stock speed, 3.2GHz, I kept reducing the CPU voltage until the PC would not boot. Then I would go back to the last Vcore that booted, and checked it for stability. If it was stable, or needed a bit more, I would adjust it and the result was the lowest Vcore needed for stock clocks with that processor.

My second G3258 at stock speed is stable at 0.83V! I doubt I will ever forget that Vcore! My first G3258 needs a Vcore of ~1.0V at stock speed to be stable. While I can't say that Vcore scaling vs speed is a straight line, how obvious is it which one will be better to OC? The actual results after over clocking both speak for themselves.

IMO, using this method to check a CPU for its OC potential is pretty good. Of course, using this method is a sure way to either disappoint you, or admire what is possible with the silicon lottery.

A tip for you about pictures of your UEFI/BIOS settings. If you put a USB flash drive into one of the USB ports on the board's IO panel, when in the UEFI UI on any screen, pressing the F12 function key will cause an image of the screen to be saved to the USB flash drive. You'll only get what is displayed on your monitor, not the entire screen if it does not all fit on the monitor's screen.

I never doubted your claim that you could get your memory running at 1600, but thanks for posting the validation. I am surprised that your board has no UEFI/BIOS updates. If you set A-Tuning to auto run when Windows boots, and if you can configure it to apply the settings to get your memory to 1600, that would be a work around to get your memory at 1600. I know you said this seems random in actual use, but worth a try.

As you know, the G3258 actually needs Turbo enabled in order to OC. I'm not referring to the Advanced Turbo 20/30 feature. It sure seems as if the UEFI and A-Tuning are not coordinated, which may be a good thing in this case.

Thanks for getting back to me again Parsec :) I thought the RAM speed was interesting, I did a lot of research before settling on the board I chose and one of the things I knew I would be sacrificing going with a B85 chipset was being limited to 1400 with the pentium G32XX so I was rather surprised when I was running benchmarks and noted my RAM was running at 800mhz (x2) in CPUZ. I rebooted and checked the bios and sure enough the hardware info page listed it as 1600 however as soon as I rebooted it reverted back to 700mhz in CPUZ. I naturally retraced my steps and after much trial and error was able to recreate the bug. It is however intermittent and does not work every time.

Edited by Xaltar - 27 May 2015 at 12:51pm

Thanks for the clarification Parsec. I am aware of the limitations of the B85 chipset with regards to overclocking my problem is that there are other H81 and B85 boards from other vendors that support VCIN and BCLK settings and these boards yield significantly higher overclocks on this CPU. Please forgive my ignorance regarding XMP I am coming from a Phenom II that obviously did not have the feature.

Edited by Xaltar - 20 May 2015 at 3:24pm

I bought a cheap board for a cheap CPU and expected it to operate along the same lines as other cheap boards. Most other B85/H81 boards from other vendors have the features I noted. I should have bought a Z97 instead but I had to allow budget for my GPU. Here I provided information that I feel needs to be addressed in the B85 Anniversary board's BIOS.

Edited by Xaltar - 17 May 2015 at 10:31pm