Hi I'm Hussein, 19, studying Computing & E-business at Aberdeen Uni. I run a business selling PC's,...
Hi I'm Hussein, 19, studying Computing & E-business at Aberdeen Uni. I run a business selling PC's, etc from home. Plz drop me an e-mail if you just want to chat. I do love making new friends online. Cheers!
Member since:18.08.2005
Reviews:48
I bought this motherboard when I was building my first ever system, mainly due to the cost but also due to it's wide range of features. On the face of it, it's nothing to shout home about, but it's reliable and should something go wrong, during installation or testing, it won't break the bank if you need to purchase another.
It comes well packaged, with a fairly well laid out multilingual manual, all the cables you'll need (Floppy, SATA, IDE), the Install CD (although in my opinion it's not really needed) and even an anti-static foam mat for preparation of the board.
On the whole, the board is well laid out, with the connectors for the drives grouped together and a good distance from the pci/agp slots. There are 6 USB 2.0 ports on this board, and they are connected by means of pins. There are also pins for firewire, audio and hardware monitoring. The only thing I would advise is to connect the cables from your computer case BEFORE you install the processor etc, otherwose it will be very difficult to reach some of them once the board is mounted in the case. Also, good dexterity is needed to get the connectors into the pins, as they are located quite close together.
All the components fit smoothly and easily into/onto the board, and not much force is required. This an ATX board, and Asrock have made the most of the space that they do use. It should be noted that there is no graphics controller on this board, but a decent card can be bought for around £27 retail. There is 5.1 channel sound, LAN and firewire though, so a basic system won't need much additional hardware.
No real configuration of the board is needed, and no jumpers need to be set. I installed Windows XP Professional on my system without problems, and all components and devices were picked up without the need for extra drivers.
This board ships with a BIOS that has a number of configurable settings, although those who are partially sighted may find it hard to read (blue/black text on a white background). The bios has hardware and temperature monitors, as well as the usual drive/device settings and password security.
This board, though cheap in cost terms is very reliable, even when put under a heavy load. My system is supporting 2 SATA drive and 2 DVD RE-writers as well as all pci slots (5 of them) and the agp slot being full. There have been no occasions of over heating, even with the system running 24/7.
All in all, this is a very good buy for all systems running pentium or celeron processors. Apart from the graphics, it has everything that you could want. And to be honest, most applications nowadays work much better with a seperate graphics card, so go for that if you can. My opinion, 9 out of 10. Recommended.
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