Utilities
The 890FX Deluxe5 comes with a plethora of utilities, most of which are useless, so we’ll just cover some of the important ones.
ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility
The first is the ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility which includes five screens: Hardware Monitor, Fan Control, Overclocking, OC DNA and IES. The Hardware Monitor Menu includes your clock speeds, fan speeds, temperatures and voltages of your entire system. The fan control menu actually allows you to manually change all your fans, from a Level 1 to Level 10 (default). I wasn’t expecting it to work, but it turns out the adjustments did work.
The Overclocking Menu allows you to make necessary adjustments to your clock speeds and voltages. I attempted to adjust the CPU Frequency, but the system ended up freezing and restarting my computer, with no overclocks made. The OC DNA menu is similar to that as in your BIOS. It allows you to save and load up to three different overclocking profiles.
Your final menu is the IES or Intelligent Energy Saver. I found my system to sit on 2 power phases, but during benchmarking it used up to 8 power phases.
Instant Boot & XFast USB
Instant boot is a small utility which gives you a faster boot time; whether it’s regular mode or fast mode you can make your boot up adjustments quickly with this small but powerful utility. XFast USB works on both the USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports and supposedly gives you a slight increase in transfer speeds. You probably won’t notice this unless you’re benchmarking, but if you’re transferring a lot of information you may want to enable this all the time.
AMD OverDrive
The final useful utility is the AMD OverDrive Utility. While this is available for most AMD motherboards, it’s still something worth noting. OverDrive includes a lot of detailed information about your computer. The first menu you’re greeted with is the System Information menu, which can be expanded into Detailed or Diagram. The Basic screen shows your processor, cache, SPD, and memory details. The status monitor gives you detailed statistics including frequency, multipliers, voltages and temperatures of your CPU, GPU, and Board.
The Performance Control tab, which expands into a bunch more, is basically you’re overclocking tab. This gives you the nitty gritty you need to make any and every adjustment to your computer. The final tab, Preference, gives you the options to switch between Novice and Advanced mode (we had it in Advanced), and some other simple preferences.
