Asrock motherboards

[anonymous-user]

Anyone got any views on these boards?

I'm looking at building a relatively low cost machine for my girlfriend's parents and prices on these look attractive. Having never used one myself and not having heard any recommendations I'm a little suspect.

They appear to do a board for around £35 with SATA, onboard sound and onboard LAN which looks to be a pretty good deal. Or is it worth spending the extra tenner to go with Asus or Abit?

[docevi1]

It is worth spending the extra tenner IMO, but Asrock are simply Asus boards appealing to the cheaper audiences...

I've built several systems using the boards and they work perfectly in the computers here. The beauty is that if something breaks it's so cheap to repair

[Bodo]

IIRC, ASrock is a budget brand from Asus. Don't know what that means though.

>> D'oh! Stefan beat me to it

>> Edited by Bodo on Sunday 23 May 21:11

[Pigeon]

I've got one, the board seems to be OK but the BIOS is a bit crap. I had to download a so-called "beta BIOS" from www.ocworkbench.com to get it to boot properly, otherwise it crashed part way through loading the kernel (can't remember exactly which operation). The replacement BIOS fixed that, but not the other problem, which is that it won't let me into the setup page for my SCSI card.

The manual says funny things about the memory speed - basically the more sticks you have, the slower it runs the bus. I overrode this in the BIOS setup and memtest86 doesn't report any problems.

There's a picture of a swimmer on the box it came in, but despite that it doesn't appear to be suitable for operation underwater.

[simpo two]

Pigeon said:

There's a picture of a swimmer on the box it came in, but despite that it doesn't appear to be suitable for operation underwater.

'ASROC' is an air-launched anti-sumbarine missile. So very suitable for operation underwater (on a one-off basis) but not sure about its use as a mobo...

[anonymous-user]

Excellent info as always.

Thanks all. Potential BIOS problems are enough to warrant the extra tenner I reckon. Especially as I'm building a system that I'm hoping will be pretty bomp proof to reduce the support calls from the girlfriend's parents.

[Plotloss]

Dabs had an NForce based board for £32 a while back.

Oddly though it doesnt have a VGA connector. All the stuff on board for VGA just no connector...

[docevi1]

LexSport said:

Thanks all. Potential BIOS problems are enough to warrant the extra tenner I reckon. Especially as I'm building a system that I'm hoping will be pretty bomb proof to reduce the support calls from the girlfriend's parents.

Spend the extra tenner, AsRock are good, but only if you know what you are doing and get a good board.