On Tuesday, February 14, 2017 at 2:34:12 PM UTC-5, Paul wrote:
Anybody here have experience with ASRock? Good, bad or indifferent?
Larc
I only have one of their motherboards. Generally the
hardware is decent. The BIOS on mine was a bit lacking,
but at the time, there were some legal issues (lawyers)
which were causing the company to not fix the BIOS properly.
A guy in Germany fixed the BIOS, and I flashed that in and
was happy after that. (Working EIST...)
Asrock usually has a different mix of connectors than an
Asus board, so that's one of the things you might spot
when buying one. I think mine had two PS/2 connectors at
the time, which is what I was looking for.
One of my pet peeves today would be "is the Vcore heatsink
big enough" ? I see a lot of fairly tiny heatsinks
out there. And my last purchased motherboard, that's
about the only thing holding it back from being
a great motherboard. Is a ****ty Vcore heatsink choice.
I never gave it a thought before I bought it, but once
it overheated, I could immediately see what a dope
I had been. For not reviewing that before purchase.
If I'd noticed that, I probably would have rejected
that one, and spent another $100 on a better motherboard.
Paul
Well Paul saved me the effort of a separate thread. I logged in today to 'complain' about this old 2007 vintage ASRock mobo:
//
asrock conroe1333-d667 Winbond W83627EHF
Brand- American megatrends Inc
Version- P1.80
Date- 12/10/2007
The Board is Asrock Conroe1333-D667
Chipset- Intel i945G/GZ Rev. A2
Southbridge-Intel 82801GB(ICH7/R)
LPCIO Winbond- W83627EHF
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Conro...p?cat=Download
//
My complain is somewhat trivial --high temperatures reported for the mobo--but may relate to what Paul is saying about the heatsink (I'm not sure, but I noticed somebody else complaining about this ten year old mobo in that it had high temperatures on Tom's Hardware site, about 9 years ago):
when I run the Open Hardware Monitor 0.8.0 beta version (freeware, works good) it has as a reported temperature as follows (note the --!!!!!! temp) :
/////////////////////
Operating System: Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.14393.0
Process Type: 32-Bit
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sensors
|
+- ConRoe1333-D667 (/mainboard)
| |
| +- Winbond W83627EHF (/lpc/w83627ehf)
)
| | +- Voltage #10 : 1.6 1.584 1.608 (/lpc/w83627ehf/voltage/9)
| | +- CPU : 32 30.5 35.5 (/lpc/w83627ehf/temperature/0)
| | +- Auxiliary : 44.5 42 96 --!!!!!!
/lpc/w83627ehf/temperature/1)
| | +- System : 33 30 35 (/lpc/w83627ehf/temperature/2)
| | +- CPU Fan : 2136.08 2136.08 2163.46
////////////////////////
Apparently this is 'normal" (from replies to a guy on Tom's Hardware), but it confused me since I was having problems, the system was acting funny on the screen, flickering, going black, then back to normal, and over and over, until after a few days I started getting BSOD, more and more (and annoyingly Windows 10 was asking if I wanted to reset the PC, which is bad advice IMO if you have a hardware problem). Of course I had backed up on an external drive my data and mirror imaged my drives. It turns out it was a old bad graphics card from 2007, a counterfeit "Nvidia", which I'll post separately on.
But what confused me was the high temps on this mobo.
Question for Paul: what would high temps do on a mobo? Give an unstable system? This "Thai" cheap core 2 duo tower always had quirks in it, and I blame the cheap mobo (and cheap components, which over the years I have replaced, not just the cheap mechanical HDD with SSDs, but also several power supplies, but so far no 'blown capacitors' as far as I can visually inspect)..
RL