Stable, lots of flexibility, great concept, I like it
Written: May 29 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Flexibility! DDR+DDR2, AGP+PCI-E, dual core support, stability, cheap, good BIOS support
Cons: Very slight speed impediment on PCI-E slot, no quad core support, limited overclocking
The Bottom Line: If you want an inexpensive but very versatile and stable board, then this board is for you. Great bang for the buck.
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| gustep's Full Review: ASRock (775Dual-VSTA) (Q120054) Motherboard |
This is the motherboard that I eventually bought to replace my ill-fated P4M800PRO-M. This particular MB appealed to me because it allowed almost complete reuse of my high-quality previous components like low latency DDR memory and a high-end AGP graphics card (X800AIW), while at the same time allowing me to upgrade to DDR2 memory and a PCI-E graphics card if I wanted. In fact, this is probably one of the only boards that have good implementations of both AGP and PCI-E graphic card slots. True, the PCI-E slot is supposedly only 4x electrically (not 16x), but the reviews say that the effect is almost negligible, you lose only about maybe 4% or so due to the 4x speed.
I have been using this board for a few months now, and I have no complaints. It seems very stable and has undergone a few BIOS updates without any glitches - the company, Asrock, is quite good at continuously servicing their BIOSes.
So what else can I say... other than stability and decent speed, both which this board has, what really matters? It's cheap. It has a lot of flexibility. And it's apparently a success, as evidenced by the fact that Asrock has now brought up a successor with quad core support, the 4CoreDual-VSTA, which is very similar to this one.
My current configuration includes 2 SATA drives (boot), 2 IDE drives, 1x AGP video card (X800AIW), 1x PCI sound card (Audigy X-Fi Fatal1ty), 1x E6300 Core2Duo CPU, and 1 gig of DDR memory (which in practice is often same speed as DDR2). All is well.
Oh, and one technical tidbit for the hardware hackers among us: I noticed that one memory control chip close to the DDR memory receptacles got really hot. Just as a precaution, I have stuck a little BGA-ramsink (small squarish heatsink available on Ebay) on this chip. I'd recommend you do the same. All other components on the board seemed reasonably cool.
Definitely recommended.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 65
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Epinions.com ID:
gustep
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Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 0 members
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