Safe way to update BIOS on ASRock P67Pro3 (B3) ?

Late response, but nonetheless:

Changing the CMOS battery didn't do a thing that I could witness.

Anyhow, as was previously mentioned that it doesn't affect my recording performance. It took me this long to test how gaming performance is affected, and by the looks of things there is no difference to what I'm seeing on Windows 7 in games like Rise of the Tomb Raider where I would definitely see a major performance drop.

In otherwords, as a gamer this probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does. MSI Afterburner, unlike HWInfo64 seems to report believable CPU Usage figures.

When I compare MSI Afterburner's values on W7 to my Task Manager's CPU usage, they're more or less the same (which makes me believe I can somewhat trust Afterburner's values as well.) While on Windows 10, my MSI Afterburner is the only one with values between 0-100%; whereas my Task Manager is just always that 100%; with the impossible hundred million percent under Resource Monitor.

So if push comes to shove, I suppose I'll trust a third party application and just resort to its monitoring rather than risk potential issues with a BIOS update, seeing that actual performance seems to be unaffected.

I should probably feel bad that I didn't test gaming performance before. Apologies for that! Thanks everyone for responding to this thread anyhow! :)


Edited by Teutep - 12 Feb 2016 at 7:09pm

Anyhow, attempts behind. Unfortunately both are no go.

1. RTC Alarm Power On: Disabled + ACPI HPTE table: Enabled = No difference.
2. RTC Alarm Power On: Disabled + ACPI HPTE table: Disabled = No difference.
3. RTC Alarm Power On: By OS + ACPI HPTE table: Disabled = No difference.

A stupid question if I may: Where in BIOS is the HPET?

EDIT: Never mind, used a cached version of this:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oI90ZUOve_QJ:ftp://asrock.cn/Manual/P67%2520Pro3.pdf and took another look at my BIOS photos and found it.


Edited by Teutep - 18 Jan 2016 at 12:19am

wardog wrote: Hmmmm, stabbing in the semi-dark here. I wonder if HPET and RTC are conflicting. Disable RTC Alarm Power On in BIOS > Advanced > ACPI Configuration, and recheck. Here I only want to disable RTC Alarm Power On. Don't mess with HPET just yet please. Disable RTC Alarm Power On and report back.

Thanks for the idea! I disabled the RTC Alarm Power On, saved settings and booted to Windows 10.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem to make a difference to my CPU Usage. (Still reporting 100% on Task Manager, and something like 200 million percent on Resource Monitor.)


Edited by Teutep - 17 Jan 2016 at 11:44pm

Second attempt at posting this (I timed out and my backup text wasn't up-to-date after all):

parsec wrote: -snip- I really wish you had clicked the Performance tab in your video, and had a third party hardware monitoring program like HWiNFO or AIDA64 running at the same time.

To my surprise, something I hadn't witnessed before, I actually started getting odd framerate drops on my desktop once I opened up [Resource Manager > CPU]. Every other tab on Resource Manager works fine though! (Demonstrated in the video added for this post: runs fine at first on [Overview] -tab; the change happens at around 1:57)

I could've cut plenty, but I figured maybe I'll just keep the whole thing. Sorry that it's near 3 minutes, but I hope it shows what you wanted me to show. If it doesn't, shame on me and back to recording.

This time instead of filling up space on my Dropbox, I decided to upload it on YouTube as an unlisted video: https://youtu.be/p_OmYn92yng

Here's a still image:

Teutep wrote: wardog wrote: In the BIOS, is there anything indicative of this Windows behavior displayed? Probably not, I'm not seeing the odd CPU usage on Windows 7 x64 side. I'll make sure to check! -snip-

Okay, so I hope I didn't do a poor job at this. If I did, tell me and I'll try my best to correct it!

As far as BIOS goes, the only thing that strikes me as odd is the CPU temperature. I'm getting around 37 celsius if I go by AXTU on Windows 7 x64 (this is where my CPU usage is normal too), but when I check the temperature in say, BIOS it's as high as 67.5 celsius implying it's not in idle.

I took screenshots, of course. I figured that just incase there's something in there that I could've missed, taking pictures of almost everything should cover most bases. (Please don't ask me why I'm on IDE instead of AHCI despite using SSD. )

ASRock UEFI SETUP UTILITY

MAIN: http://i.imgur.com/M8HU30u.jpg
OC Tweaker:
#1: http://i.imgur.com/evY6bms.jpg
#2: http://i.imgur.com/UahPeaR.jpg (Copy, I can't get it to work)

DRAM Configuration:

#1: http://i.imgur.com/bo5KYYw.jpg
#2: http://i.imgur.com/Kcwht0I.jpg


Advanced: http://i.imgur.com/L6nSSbz.jpg

CPU Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/50FuhYk.jpg
North Bridge Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/e05MJy6.jpg
South Bridge Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/I61wJva.jpg
Storage Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/jW0ETsX.jpg
Super IO Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/VfqwUEa.jpg
ACPI Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/bh0h9mu.jpg
USB Configuration: http://i.imgur.com/oYECAmH.jpg

H/W Monitor: http://i.imgur.com/wf5VJU2.jpg <- 67.5 Celsius as CPU Temp!
Boot: http://i.imgur.com/lA5KDrY.jpg
Security: http://i.imgur.com/nGLauBS.jpg
Exit: http://i.imgur.com/YpQLAas.jpg

MISC
Some other people who have (had) this issue (in the past):

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-other_settings/why-is-windows-10-final-build-showing-100-cpu/493e1afa-8fce-4779-8962-8e21dfe57df9
http://www.windows10forums.com/threads/cpu-usage-reporting-wrong-with-task-manager-100.3163/
http://www.overclock.net/t/1566642/windows-10-cpu-usage-always-at-100-need-help/
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/3hgmt1/windows_10_cpu_100_bug_with_asrock_p67_pro3/
http://nerdanswer.com/answer.php?q=1070810

Edited by Teutep - 17 Jan 2016 at 8:17pm