News - ASRock makes a splash with A-Style Z87 motherboards

[HEXUS]

Claims waterproof Z87 OC Formula is plain better than ASUS's Sabertooth.

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[NiPPonD3nZ0]

"Oppa AsROCK Style"...

xD

[OilSheikh]

Does this mean, we will no longer need fans to cool down things in the coming days ?

[Pleiades]

Solo presentation by Han, very enthusiastic, maybe bit less caffeine next time LOL.

Like the direction Asrock is going, onwards & upwards, even giving a light bashing to old Mother Asus... ;-)

[Kovoet]

One thing about ASrock is they aren't scarred of trying anything. But will say they have improved so much

[Whizzkid]

I remember ASRock being absolute cack and few years ago. They have come on leaps and bounds since then. Definately a manufacturer to watch.

[Shirty]

Without a doubt they are becoming one of the leaders in motherboard innovation now. They aren't afraid to try something new and whilst their product haven't always offered the polish of some more established names, they seem to have weathered the storms extremely well.

My first Conroe board was a cheap ASRock model and it was a bit quirky and a poor overclocker but perfectly serviceable. Several boards later and I'm using one again, this time it's pretty well on a par with anything other manufacturers could offer.

[Kovoet]

Without a doubt they are becoming one of the leaders in motherboard innovation now. They aren't afraid to try something new and whilst their product haven't always offered the polish of some more established names, they seem to have weathered the storms extremely well.

My first Conroe board was a cheap ASRock model and it was a bit quirky and a poor overclocker but perfectly serviceable. Several boards later and I'm using one again, this time it's pretty well on a par with anything other manufacturers could offer.

Yep my first Conroe was also a asrock as they were so cheap. Might just get me another.

[Shirty]

I think mine was the "ConRoeXFire-eSATA2" - what a name!

[Kovoet]

Lol but they were good stepping stones to more expensive ones.

[Bambooz]

Had two ASRock board during the S478 Pentium 4 / Socket A Athlon XP era. First a K7VT4A+ which developed capacitor problems (I've recapped it. Still got it, still working) and later a P4i65GV, which did not have a proper AGP slot (they called it "AGI"), so 60% of the cards simply didn't work. After a year or so the CPU VRM fried and killed my CPU in the process I've avoided ASRock from that point on.. just wasn't worth the trouble with the quirky stuff they churned out.

Decided to try ASRock one more time years later when I upgraded from yet another ancient S478 P4 system to my first Core 2 Duo, but didn't have enough money to buy everything new.
I had DDR-RAM and an AGP card, but almost all Core2 stuff was DDR2 and PCIe .. almost.

What I went with was a ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA. The everything-hybrid. Had AGP and PCIe, and DDR-RAM and DDR2-RAM support. And obviously supported Core2 based CPUs.
It didn't overclock well (I think I got my C2D E4300 1.8GHz to max. 2.4GHz .. FSB brick wall) and DDR2 memory bandwidth was rather poor (as I later found out), but I got to keep my 1.5GB DDR400 RAM and my overclocked AGP Geforce 6800GT for a while longer. That exact board still works just fine to this day, doesn't have any capacitor or stability problems and just.. well.. it works Oo

Since then I've bought quite a few ASRock boards and built systems with them with no real problems. Just update the BIOS ASAP, as they seem to always ship with the release BIOS, while the ASRock website is 3-5 versions ahead already..

---

ASRock always seems to do stuff no other manufacturer cares about. For example they had "universal" retention modules on their S754/939/478 boards, which allowed you to mount either S478 Pentium 4 coolers on AMD sockets 754/939, or just about any AMD cooler since socket 754 on intels socket 478. The retention module had mounting options for both.

A more recent example are their S1155 boards which have offset cooler mounting holes so you could use either S1155 coolers (white circle around the holes) or S775 coolers on S1155.

Also don't forget about the strange upgrade boards, like the K8Upgrade-NF3 with its S754 and an upgrade card to make it S939.
Or the even weirder Combo line of motherboards with two (!) CPU sockets on one board. Both in AMD (K8 Combo-Z with S754 + S939) and Intel (P4 Combo with S478 + S775) flavours.

Another interesting board is the 775i65G R2.0 or R3.0. Thats a Socket 775 board with an intel i865G chipset, AGP slot and DDR-RAM. Nothing interesting so far. But ASRock somehow managed to make the old 2003 Socket 478 Pentium4 era i865G (not 965!) chipset work with Core 2 Duo/Quad CPUs and their Pentium Dualcore equivalents
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/775i65G%20R2.0/
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/775i6...Specifications

Yet another one: The P67 Transformer, which is a S1156 motherboard with the P67 chipset.

Sure.. this isn't really relevant anymore these days, but some of this stuff is just amazing from an engineering point of view. Plus they've probably developed/designed a lot these boards knowing they would end up being niche market stuff, but released them anyway (taking a risk)

[Pleiades]

Yep had the 4coreVSTA too Bambooz, good little board and well worth it for the flexibility it offered at the time. Had the K8Ugrade too and one of the combo boards...

Was amazed little Asrock came out with this stuff at the time, and like you say, no1 else bothered with eclectic options like that (the boring old farts LOL)!

Bit upset my ex-wife trashed the AMD PC whilst we were separated, was working fine (754 with 939 socket I believe)...

Still have a board somewhere that IIRC upgrades a Socket A (?) to Socket 754. Maybe I should donate it to a museum if I can find it LOL

Edit: Oh here it is http://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/upgrad...odel=754Bridge

[bdaniel7]

I understand that Chinese/Taiwanese companies are hiring Europeans/Americans for PR, to make them look better when negotiating with other companies.
I think it's better for them to invest in teaching their employees a proper English.

[Pleiades]

I think it's better for them to invest in teaching their employees a proper English.

Yeah, speak proper, like what you do

It'd be better if more 'Westerners' started learning Mandarin IMO