X-bit labs

Started by: Ivan | Date 12/26/07

Comments: 15 | Last Comment:  01/04/08

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1. With high availability and decent prices of P35 boards, I really don't see why should anyone choose a P31 board (and especially this one) over one of those. Maybe for an entry level system, but that's it - when building a high performance system, saving $10-$20 on a motherboard can easily backfire at you, and this article shows that very well.

Also, for a bit of amazement, take a look at the Abit board mentioned in the Conclusion (enlarge the picture), for that's got to be the weirdest PCB layout ever: a back panel that looks like it is missing a few items, asymmetrically positioned DIMM slots, with one of them resting on the PCI-E 16x, SATA connectors too close to PCI slots... And if someone buys that to put a Core 2 Extreme on it, especially after reading the specs and how support for such CPUs is achieved...

I'm sorry, but do you even understand the target market of the ASRock brand?

The point is to provide the value and budget markets. NOT the expensive "performance" or "enthusiast" market.

People who buy ASRock mobos won't be buying "Extreme" editions of CPUs.

I didn't mention Extreme Edition CPUs when I talked about the ASRock board, I was refering to the bizarre specs of a board mentioned in the Conclusion.

As for the target market of this board, I see that it costs $92 on Newegg (and over $100 in some other places), and that's not so dirt cheap in my book. In fact, I recently helped a friend build a PC, and we picked a Gigabyte board for 75e, which is hardly much more expensive, and we got a P35 mobo which truly supports all those features, works well, has all solid state capacitors and, as I've heard, OCs like hell, so I know that what one should expect of a product with such a price tag.

2. Theres a heading saying overclocking but absolutely no mention of any attempt to do so. The article swings from positive to negative with no real reasoning, and makes no mention of price which is probably the only reason paople would be looking at this board, very ppor work indeed.

Even though the post above has very poor spelling ( :p ) i agree with him. You've mentioned lots of negative assumptions.
For example the caps, they're not solid state caps, but does this make the board unstable? Perhaps that the mobo life becomes limited compared to others, please elaborate. Now i don't know, only the fact that i'ts a bad thing.
This also goes the for the heatsink on the chipset. Was it getting very hot while you overclocked a bit? I have to assume it did, yet you don't really say this.

I'm also left a bit confused for which market this motherboard is meant for. It seems like a budget board.

Other than that, I thought it was a good article. With a few good practical bits.

3. not got asrock motherboards for an long time to unpredictable boards only use 20 pin power (i am mosty shocked it comes with the extra P4 power connecter)

there seems to be no Q fan on most of there motherboards as well

thay just seem like makeing the motherboards as cheap as thay can

That's the point.

ASRock is a value brand of ASUS.

4. Yeah this review failed. The asrock board is a cheap solution that offers value not performance / features. You can't compare it with Abit/Asus expensive products.

I own myself an asrock p4i65g board. It works fine and I even overclock a P4 northwood 3.0ghz @ 3.5ghz (235mhzx15) and 2GB of DDR400 and a 550W cheap PSU. The board was bought for only $49. Been using this board for 2 years now.

5. Yeah, I agree, this comparison was looking at apples and oranges. This AsRock board is definitely meant for the value crowd. I personally like the fact that AsRock still has 20-pin ATX power connectors. I have some older PC Power and Cooling PSUs which still work great... but only have 20-pin connectors. I would use this board with one of those 310W or 360W PCP&C PSUs and either a Celeron 4XX, the future Celeron Dual Core E1XXX or Pentium Dual Core E2XXX. I do wish AsRock would start using solid state capacitors for the power regulation circuitry, however, I must admit I've never had a problem with any of the previous AsRock boards I've owned. They have been very solid and overclock moderately well.

I also need to mention that Abit may not have a P31 based motherboard, but they have the IP35-V which is a P35 solution using the ICH7 southbridge. Not sure why Abit didn't just put a P31 on that board, but it doesn't matter. The IP35-V with P35 works very well with my E4500... and oveclocks well too.

Check out the upcoming ASRock solutions for 2008.

ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFI+
http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?p=424832
(solid capacitor mobo.)

ASRock 4Core1600Twins-P35
http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs/showthread.php?p=424878

Both support DDR2 and DDR3, and bus speeds up to 1600Mhz.

The ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFI+ looks very interesting with its solid capacitor design. If the price is resonable it could be the next 775Dual-VSTA (which supported DDR and DDRII) for the DDRII to DDR3 crowd.

But price talks... this has to be in the mid-$70 range or I would look for a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L or even GA-P31-DS3L. That would be the board's competetion for a while... DDR3 is too expensive to make the future upgradability a high perk for the board. It might in 6 months, but not today. Nonetheless, I am interested in getting my hands on a ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFI+ to give it a whirl.

Thanks for the link.

6. Its clear that Xbitlabs.com used this article to try to put down OCWorkbench.com (clearly seen in the conclusion).

Unfortunately for Xbitlabs, they produced a half-arse article, with piss poor reasons in putting down a product.

This one is a below standard article, even for Xbitlabs.

7. The Asus P5GC-MX/1333 has been out for a while now and supports 45nm CPUs.

8. "Until the infrastructure switches completely to 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit applications, it doesn’t make much sense to install even 4GB of RAM, not to mention 8GB."

This is incorrect: There is an increasing number of people already switching to a 64-Bit system because of the current very low price of DDR2-RAM. The difference between 2 and 4GB in Vista 64, for example, is indeed noticeable. Conrtrary to what the author seems to believe I think the switchover to 64-Bit is going to commence very soon and not in the distant future. For this reason, I would definitely opt for a P35 chipset and not the castrated P31.

9. Well is a good and serius review but remenber that Asrock is a company that only make entry level mobos so we can't expect to much from this brand.

I think they are cheap and with a modest perform.

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