Conclusion

If we recall everything we said in this review, you may get the wrong impression of the ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. We did point out a few design issues, problems during work in nominal mode and during overclocking, several flaws in the mainboard BIOS. However, ASRock deserves the most positive feedback for the mere release of this very board. Yes, it inferior to Gigabyte solutions on the same chipset from several standpoints, but let me remind you that it took Gigabyte quite some time before we started to like their mainboards. For a considerable while “Gigabyte mainboard” has a negative connotation and only over the past few years things started to improve, and now Gigabyte mainboards are ones of the best in the entire computer industry.

I think ASRock’s problem is that they wanted to get all at once. It is not a coincidence that they called their new mainboard a “SuperComputer”. The developers wanted to make sure that you can easily install up to four graphics cards, enable power-saving right from the BIOS, save settings profiles, easily overclock the CPU or system memory to the desired frequency… These are very natural and good goals, but it is not easy to do everything correctly on the first attempt from scratch. In this situation some problems are simply inevitable. I think it would have been much better if the company hadn’t tried to catch up with and outrun all competitors at once, but had taken full advantage of its unique competitive features.

What do we know ASRock mainboards for in the first place? Unique technical solutions and low price. What will we remember ASRock X58 SuperComputer for? Well, I believe it will be the unusual “Powered eSATAII/USB” connector and that’s about it. In my opinion, they had to give up four PCI Express x16 slots and leave only two of them, because most users will still use only one anyway. Making the layout a little simpler this way could help lower the price of this board. They had to focus on flawless operation in nominal mode and on basic CPU overclocking functionality and only then try to simplify, automate and optimize these processes. What we have at this point is a pretty expensive mainboard with a lot of features, some of which do not work properly or do not work at all.

But nevertheless, despite all the issues we pointed out, I really liked ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. It works, it can even overclock CPUs, it exists, unlike mainboards from Abit, Chaintech or EPoX. It will be really sad if we will be stuck only with Asus and Gigabyte mainboards without any freedom of choice. That is why I sincerely hope that ASRock Company will continue working on the new mainboards, will take into account the issues we pointed out and next time they will make a perfect mainboard that will proudly bear the “SuperComputer” title.

ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard is currently available on Newegg for $294.99.