ASRock P4VT8 - motherboard - ATX - PT800

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Ease of Installation	Very poor - very time consuming and confusing
Stability	Average
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Still availble for the ever dwindling socket 478
Disadvantages:	Not very friendly interface or screw placement

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

This is a socket 478 motherboard still on sale at places like Maplins for around £60. Despite socket 478 motherboards being rare, and you'd be hard pushed to find one other than this, I would still steer way clear of this excuse for a motherboard.

Upon personal experiance and purchase of this motherboard, the first, was dead on arrival, much to my dismay. I then returned this to where I purchased it, and instead of getting a refund, I got a replacement, which I imediatly regretted.

The packaging may be lovley, yet the screw placement when trying to put the thing in the pc is a nightmare, with screw holes being right next to overly large capacitors, this caused no end of frustration. When I finnaly got all the screws in, along with any cables for from USB and audio getting into the BIOS became the next problem! There was no clear way to do it, so you bash the keyboard hoping to hit the right key (F2 by the way). After changing the boot priority to my cd drive to load windows, saving and exiting, the BIOS seemed to ignore it, and tried 3 TIMES to boot from an empty hard drive, til it finnaly listened to my instruction.

However, it isnt all negative, the price is good for such a rare item, and it does support the last of the 478 processors (3.6Ghz Prescott). Also, with the location of the socket itself, it is able to have some of the more flashy Zalman fans along with the manual being very clear. With the 800FSB and support of 400mhz Ram, it isnt all bad if you have the patience.

In conclusion, this attempt by Asrock to make a good socket 478 motherboard falls short if you dont have the patience to deal with alot of fidly bits, you'd be much better off buying an Asus P4p800 series which are also still on sale, at a slightly higher price.