Stephen wrote:
On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:44:06 -0500, Paul wrote:
The other Asrock board, has two DDR2 slots. ASRock A785GM-LE
I've not heard of asrock before. Who are they? Are their boards any
good?
They are the "low cost" offshoot of Asus. (They mention Pegatron in
the article, and Pegatron is also an Asus operation.) So it's still Asus,
but at "arms length" and in separate facilities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asrock
I only have one of their boards here, and the BIOS code was left
unfinished in a couple areas (I suspected "lawyer trouble" as
the root cause, rather than carelessness. I think Intel threatened
them. SpeedStep code was turned off. A hacker in Germany figured
out how to turn it back on. I ended up running a modified BIOS
in the motherboard.)
As long as the customer reviews for the Asrock board don't indicate
problems of that sort, a bad BIOS, I think the board is a safe
purchase. My Asrock board, at $65, still runs. I was half expecting
a $65 motherboard to just blow up after a year, but it hasn't.
Asrock tries to do "non-mainstream" things. Like that example motherboard
I showed you, with two DDR2 slots and two DDR3 slots. You can't install
four DIMMs at the same time, with that setup. Only two at a time. Either
use two DDR2 sticks, or two DDR3 sticks, and the stick type supported
would be a function of the processor used. Some AMD processors support
both DDR2 and DDR3, in which case, you can use either.
My Asrock motherboard, has both an AGP video slot and a PCI express
video slot (and both could be used at the same time). Not many motherboards
are built like that! I suspect they made those motherboards, until they
ran out of chipsets to use. Asrock also made some motherboards, where
the processor was on a replaceable vertical module, so you could
do an upgrade without throwing away the base board. Adding novelties
is how they try to establish their own "niche" personality. If they
did "bog standard" boards like their parent Asus, you wouldn't have
been able to tell the two companies apart. (Asus also makes low-cost
boards, typically microATX for business PC applications.)
Paul