Asrock quality?

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Asrock quality?

What's funny is I have two Asrock boards, I was trying them out to offer a cheaper solution to my customers.There's one in my grandmother's computer and another one in my dad's media pc and I had them for 3 years and they are still running. Hell the one in my dad's media pc was hit by lightning well more like a massive surge which took out the keyboard/mouse ps/2 ports and the onboard nic, but that thing is still going. How bizarre? perhaps asrock is better then asus themselves?

[c_hegge]

Re: Asrock quality?

Both have features which I hate - bad caps and backward markings, just so you blow up all of your replacment caps when it comes time to recap.

[ncovert]

Re: Asrock quality?

I seem to never have serious problems with Asrock or Asus boards. They seem pretty decent.

[colormebad]

Re: Asrock quality?

Both have features which I hate - bad caps and backward markings, just so you blow up all of your replacment caps when it comes time to recap.

How much do you get paid to give Asus & Asrock a bad rap ? LoL

[acstech]

Re: Asrock quality?

How much do you get paid to give Asus & Asrock a bad rap ? LoL

A little defensive for someone without a financial interest in it, aren't we?

In my experience, Asus and Asrock quality has been very hit and miss. I've had good Asus boards, and I've had boards that aren't worth a thin ****. I've had ones that aren't too well designed. A certain M2N-E with an overheating southbridge chip comes to mind.

I have *many* more examples. In my experience, it's about 50/50 wether you get a bad one or a good one. In my opinion, they're no better than ECS. Most of 'em work fine out of the box, unless they're really poorly designed, but the issues do eventually crop up.

In their defense though, the only Asrock board I used was sold about 5 years ago as a replacement, and as far as I know, it's still going.

[colormebad]

Re: Asrock quality?

A little defensive for someone without a financial interest in it, aren't we?

In my experience, Asus and Asrock quality has been very hit and miss. I've had good Asus boards, and I've had boards that aren't worth a thin ****. I've had ones that aren't too well designed. A certain M2N-E with an overheating southbridge chip comes to mind.

I have *many* more examples. In my experience, it's about 50/50 wether you get a bad one or a good one. In my opinion, they're no better than ECS. Most of 'em work fine out of the box, unless they're really poorly designed, but the issues do eventually crop up.

In their defense though, the only Asrock board I used was sold about 5 years ago as a replacement, and as far as I know, it's still going.

oh! Im just playing around a little..I have had really good luck with Asus' service and all, for years...I also want to try the ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3...Seen and heard alot of good stuff about that one also...Have a few friends running it and seems to be doing well...

[Scenic]

Re: Asrock quality?

I have the original P35-DS3 without any suffix, and yes that BIOS bug happened to me once. Clearing the CMOS via the "hard" method ie removing all power and the battery made it go away for good. No other complaints with this board. Been running at maximum NB and FSB voltage (+0.3v over whatever the stock might be as it only tells me the actual voltages for CPU and RAM) ever since i got it and clocking like mad, and it's yet to do anything fishy. E6550 @ 3.61GHz, 8GB Corsair XMS2 1066, HD3870.

The restart-bug happened to me too a couple times. Mostly while playing with the OC settings. Simple CMOS reset fixes it. Always.

Still rockin' a Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 @ 3.6GHz, 8GB Mushkin Stiletto DDR3-1333 (double of what the P35 is supposed to support in just 2 slots ) and a Sapphire HD6870.

Still pretty capable.
http://bambooz.pytalhost.net/stuff/heaven_3.0.jpg
http://bambooz.pytalhost.net/stuff/unigine.jpg

Benchmark ran at 2.4GHz CPU clock (stock) cause my BIOS forgot its OC settings (dead battery) and I was too lazy to reboot and fix it (sys has been up 24/7 for 2 weeks now if that tells you anything.. )

Oh and yeah.. the benchmark is called "Unigine Heaven 3.0". You can grab it here if you want: http://unigine.com/products/heaven/download/
It says "DX11 Benchmark", but it has options for DX10, DX9 and OpenGL too. The settings I used are visible in the 2nd screenshot above.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Asrock quality?

Didn't know they made one with DDR3. That's quite a nice board.

[Scenic]

Re: Asrock quality?

It's a "bastardized" (E)P35-DS3R
The "C" in the model name means it has DDR2 and DDR3 support. In this case 4x DDR2 slots & 2x DDR3 slots.

Quick intro into the Gigabyte Model number stuff from back then:

• E = Dynamic Energy Saver (D.E.S.) (supports dynamically switching CPU VRM phases on/off.. useless gimmick)
• P35/P31/G33/G41/P43/... = chipset .. duh
• C = DDR2 and DDR3 support
• T = DDR3 only
• lacking the T or C = DDR2 RAM only
• M = micro ATX
• D = Ultra Durable 1 or 2 series (all poly caps)
• S2 = Smart & Safe
• S3 = Smart & Safe & Speed (some OC features)
• S4 = Smart & Safe & Speed & Silent (more OC features, heatpipe cooling)
• S5 = Smart & Safe & Speed & Silent & Crossfire (even more...)
• Q6 = Quad everything. Optimized for quadcores. Total overkill boards that support everything you could imagine.
• UD = Ultra Durable 3 (only intel G/P4x (newer) boards)
• L = Lite version. Crippled BIOS, "worse" components (like 5.1 audio instead of 7.1, no Gigabit LAN etc.) or missing some ports like SATA
• R = RAID capable chipset/southbridge (ICH9R in my case)
• P = clusterf*ck of additional ports/components which probably only gigabyte knows how to decipher properly

The S2-S5 stuff is sort of a feature-ranking. Q6 literally has everything you could imagine. S5's have heatpipe cooling for the VRM and chipset, and support AMD/ATI Crossfire (2 GPUs), S4 still have heatpipe cooling, but lack crossfire support, S3 lacks the heatpipe cooling, S2 is the absolute rock bottom stuff (e.g. G31M-S2L .. G31 Chipset, micro ATX, heatsink cooling (S2), Lite version (crippled BIOS, less ports, etc.))

The above is ONLY for S775 era boards. They shifted, dropped, modified and clusterf*cked those abbreviations multiple times for newer sockets/boards. Only the "M" and the "L" are still used in the same way AFAIK

Last but not least.. Visual indication of the grading.. the most obvious thing
P31-S3L


P35-DS3


EP35-DS4


EX38T-DQ6


Price range of the boards pictured above was roughly 40eur/50usd (P31-S3L) to 230eur/300usd (EX38T-DQ6) (checked against my fav. price comparison site's price-log)