It is a surprise move by ASRock to use VIA chipset for its AM2 board. As usual, ASRock wouldn't go for it if there aren't treasures hidden in the CF stepping chipset. As you can see from the benchmarks, the performance is almost on par with the other two platforms using high end chispets NV 590 SLI and ATi RD 580.

In terms of features, this board supports the new AM2 socket 940 processors. With 1GHz HT and Cool'n'quiet. It comes with 4xDDRII-800 slots which can accomodate up to 8GB of DDRII memory in total. On top of that, it has  1 x PCI Express x16 slot and 1 x PCI Express x4/x1 slot and 1 x PCI Express x1 slot. THe board comes with 2 x Serial ATA 1.5 Gb/s, support RAID 0, 1, JBOD and "Hot Plug" functions. This is also the first board that has a HDMI_SPDIF header, providing SPDIF audio output to HDMI VGA card, allows the system to connect HDMI Digital TV/projector/LCD devices. One thing to note is that the board comes with a PCIe x4 slot which is open ended. That is to say, there is a high chance you can plug in 2 PCIe graphics cards and run them in a 16+4 combination (ending in 4x+4x) for multichrome using S25 or S27 cards.

In terms of overclocking, the board has the basic options like voltage for dimm and cpu, cpu freq range of up to 300MHz and a up to 25x multiplier option. Most importantly, this board is Windows Vista™ Premium Logo Hardware Ready so you are safe from any future compatibility issue with the new OS whe it is out in the market. There are options to lock PCI and PCIe too.

In our overclocking test, we set the HT multiplier to 4x (800MHz) and set the CPU multiplier to 10x, CPU Vcore to 1.4v and push the CPU CLK to 280MHz. Guess what, the system went into WindowsXP  at 2.8GHz! verclocking features are there. You can change the voltage levels of the CPU, HT, NB etc. See Gallery for BIOS options. It is strange that the VIA K8T890CF is recognised as a VIA K8T900 chipset.

A multilanguage manual is provided and Hot Plug SATA and power cables are provided together with drivers CD.

Overall, I am impressed by the performance and o/c of this board based on the VIA K8T890 CF stepping chipset. As price/performance is the main target group of ASRock, it left out features like 1394, SATA2 etc. ASRock would have paired it up with the newer VIA South bridge supporting SATA II, GbE provided that it won't jack up the price too much with a more expensive south bridge.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• Hot Plug SATA
• Open ended PCIe x4 slot

Cons

• No SATA II
• No GBE
• No eSATA
• No 1394

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.