"Piotr Makley" wrote in message
...
Asrock and Asus motherboards are both made by Asustek. So what is
the main difference between them?

I am told that Asrock is a cheaper range so is one range positoned
to be cheap and the other to be more expensive but with more
features? Or do both ranges aim at broadly the same market but one
is built better than the other?


I've seen somewhere that Asrock was a Chinese daughter company of Astek
intended to allow Asus to compete with companies like Elite eo in the
motherboard entry market. So recently I decided to purchase my first Asrock
P4VT8, where the box mentioned plenty of nice features, all at a very nice
price.
When installing however, I discovered a lot of "anomalies". Some examples:
- the board has 2 SATA connectors, but drivers have to be loaded from
diskettes at initial setup in order to recognize SATA drives;
- when shutting down the computer, power is still delivered to on-board USB
connectors, resulting in USB devices (6 in 1 card readers, for ex)with leds
always on;
- the board crashes randomly (up to 3 - 4 times a day);
- the temp and voltage reports of the board are wrong: cpu temp is mostly at
72°C (although feeling cold), -12 V is reported -0.17 V, and so on.
- there is no dual channel DDR available (but I must say dual-channel is not
mentioned on the box);
- installation of windows 2000 worked normally, but install of Win XP was
totally impossible (Win setup freezes early, at "press F6 to load additional
disk drivers").
This could have been an isolated single bad experience, but I did some
search on the net and encountered a lot of idenditical or similar
experiences.
I always loved Asus and installed many of those boards for P3 and P4 without
any problem. My first trial with Asrock was a total failure and I even
couldn' t get valuable support. I soon replaced the P4VT8 by an Asus P4P800
(price difference is not that big), and all problems above disappeared.
This was my first and last Asrock !!!