Asrock going on the AMD front lines with the new chipset the AMD’s 790GX series with full integrated VGA chip imbedded in the motherboard. With Asrock going the budget alternative to all of their products, with the AMD is no exception, with the new 790GX with full integrated VGA graphics with the full support in and HDMI decoding, good for those in a full support to the independent Quad cores of the Phenom and the good surround system with HI-Def movies in your computer or as a home theatre system, whatever your liking and if you hate it or love it you got to find that 790GX that AMD made for the past five years.
With the Asrock going the blue PCB colour with the two separate chipset, the North and the South bridge separate with the VGA with the Northbridge and the treatment of dedicated 128MB’s of memory for the VGA, good for those integrated VGA’s with no need for those large noisy discrete graphics. Good for those media PC’s builds, but never the flaws of Asrock in mind, with some problems of placement. With the single SATA port placed in the top of the board, in which you will never going to use and the publicized WIFI- connection for the board, with the most cases you need to as the board you bought if it includes it, with the ASUS on the Deluxe version of their WIFI-included packages, Asrock tries best to find their own angle. With the Wi-Fi port placed between the bottom two PCI slots, the convenience of making it on top may help abit with the connection coverage rather than down there.
Just to start with it the boards layout is not bad but cannot be loved that much, with the socket surrounded with power regulators and also the six (plus the on the one on the top) SATA ports quite well away from the PCIex ports with long graphics cards. With the three normal PCI slots, it is not for those using PCIex 1x and 4x, they would definitely love this board. With two PCIex 16x and the unusual looking chip in between them, that says SLI and crossfire support, well believe half of it, you cannot place dual NVIDIA graphics, but only to support the NVIDIA single slot video card, only the ATI cards can be supported to dual cards, and the HD3300 integrated graphics with no good for NVIDIA, can only be support on hybrid crossfire with its own brand and don’t make me think about the placement of the floppy drive port!
But the Board is still going with the goods with full solid capacitors, the RAM slots way on top, actually way too high in my standards, but good enough for those lazy mobo makers. With the support of the new AM3 socket, with surprising the same pin count with the AM2+, but the noticeable difference is the support of the faster DDR3 memory and the plus on to give way for the new AMD processors to support the AM3 socket and the architecture of the 45nm fabrication. And the back panel going with single eSATA ports, one firewire port, six USB port, two VGA ports with HDMI adaptor and two PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard; just about enough to go on as a home theatre.
With the unlockable VGA clock speed with all of the AMD790GX, you can at least get some speed out of the integrated alone, with the speeds going with the integrated in overclocked speed with almost as fast as the Gigabyte counterpart, and the memory and CPU speeds, acceptable when using in most gaming and home or also entertainment system. With the Asrock with the mix with me, with a better AMD790GX chipset and good performance, you wouldn’t leave it behind in your list. But never a AMD lover, you can make this a good home-theatre in a good price.