“EuP Ready” and Additional Materials

Before we move on to the results of our practical experiments, we have to add a few last strokes to the portrait of the ASRock X58 Extreme mainboard and ASRock Company that you might already have in front of your eyes. At first, I have to say that the quality of informational materials is quite standard, I would even say average, while the ASRock company web-sites are pretty informative. The mainboard is bundled with a thick paper manual. In fact, this is none other but brief assembly and installation instructions in several different languages. The CD disk contains the full version of the manual in English. It is also of rather average quality: not bad, but at the same time not excellent. It does cover all major topics, but we wish there were more detailed descriptions of certain features and peculiarities. For example, the manual mentions that “Overclock Mode” parameter can also be set to “Optimized”, but there is no information about the specifics of this operational mode and the possible consequences of enabling it.

During the discussion of ASRock X58 Extreme exterior design, we didn’t mention one drawback we found: there is not even one LED anywhere on the board. We can name several mainboards that use too many LEDs. Excessive illumination is in no way helpful, but on the contrary is very confusing and annoying that is why we have always considered the option to disable the onboard LEDs to be an advantage. However, I believe that there should be at least one LED signaling that the board receives power. But ASRock X58 Extreme has a very good excuse for that.

A page on the English-language ASRock web-site devoted to ASRock X58 Extreme mainboard tells us that “X58 Extreme [is] Worldwide First EuP Ready Motherboard!”. Frankly speaking, I didn’t have any idea what that abbreviation stood for, so I googled “EuP” and the “readiness conditions” for it. Surprisingly, I found pretty detailed information on the matter… on ASRock’s official web-site. I should have paid more attention to beautiful multi-color links on the left-hand side (they looked so much like the ad-banners most users rarely notice) and to the logos of supported functions and technologies that go right after the brief description of mainboard features. By clicking on the icon I could open a brief description and the links on the left lead to individual pages each devoted to a specific feature or technology.

The page contains extensive info about the board. The menu in the upper left part of the site provides links to latest driver and BIOS updates, electronic version of the manual, CPU, memory and graphics card compatibility list. You won’t need to wander around the site looking for information and use the search function too many times, which is a great plus.

ASRock Company doesn’t have too many localized web-sites. Besides the English-language site, there are sites in China, Taiwan, France, Russia and a Spanish language Latin-American site. Only six sites are not too much, but if you think about it, they cover most of the world’s population. Moreover, they translated not only the basic stuff, but all the pages about functions and technologies, too. In my opinion, ASRocks efforts and commitment to ensure proper informational content of their web-sites and Internet deserve our ultimate gratitude.

In particular, going back to where we started this conversation. We can learn that “EuP” stands for “Energy Using Product”. This standard was developed by the European Union to define the power consumption of complete systems. Since the popularity of electronic equipment continues to increase over the next 20-30 years, the EU decided to introduce a new efficient strategy for regulating power consumption levels. To meet “EuP” standards the powered off system should consume less than 1 W of power. Of course, it is absolutely impossible to achieve this level of energy-efficiency without trying to save on everything, even the smallest things, like LEDs. That is why the absence of any LEDs on ASRock X58 Extreme mainboard looks quite explainable and justified from this standpoint.