CPU power management done right

Power management while overclocking has always been a miss among most motherboards(if not all). ASRock delivered a new X58 motherboard closer to power saving perfection.

A common fallacy of overclocking current processors is the loss of power management of the CPU. In the days of the Pentium 3 and Athlon XP it wasn't a big deal, as the feature wasn't available either way. Nowadays all CPUs support active power management and the power savings are usually very rewarding, with graphics cards following the same path, although not in a widespread way.

Taking example from AMD unlocked Black edition CPUs, if one had a motherboard that provided the proper choice of lower multiplier and voltage and higher multiplier and voltage, using a CPU at 800MHz and 1v - or less - and having it running full steam at 3.6GHz and 1.5v, the power savings would be very relevant for the machine. When it works, the most common is having the CPU overclocked by FSB and, while the voltage usually stays the same, the multiplier is manipulated up and down. This ensures that the CPU goes to about half the load power consumption.
That is the simpler way, since your lower multiplier will also result in an increased clock, one avoids problems of instability at the lower clock. A simpler situation would be to have the idle voltage be incremented by whatever we added to the load voltage, which would still ensure stability at idle clocks. Full control on the VID and FID tables, I still haven't seen, but I dream off.

ASRock has delivered close to these features by providing two voltage steps and multiplier adjustment, although you'll have to guarantee that the CPU is also stable at idle clocks:

As a result, Intel processor power-saving technologies did lower the CPU Vcore and multiplier in idle mode:


When the processor workload increased the clock frequency multiplier increased to 21 due to Intel Turbo Boost technology. In this case the CPU frequency rose to 3.8 GHz and the memory always remained at 1810 MHz with 9-9-9-24-1T timings. As you can see from the CPU-Z screenshot, under load processor Vcore is increased to 1.248 V (1.225 V being the nominal) because of the enabled “ASRock VDrop Control” function.

The motherboard is the ASRock X58 Extreme which, as you can see in the screenshot, is an LGA 1366 motherboard. It would be nice to have this kind of features in all overclocking motherboards that are called as such, and not just in $200 motherboards for $250 processors.

I hated every ASRock motherboard I had - five, if I remember well. Either the BIOS wasn't any good or it had compatibility problems, design problems, just plain stopped working after a few months, bad capacitors, the list goes on. Lately they have been receiving some good reviews and this motherboard has impressed me - they are certainly shaking away the bad brand image they had not so long ago. Kudos!