- Sep 8, 2010
- 304
- 0
- 18,810
Given that new AMD CPU family is on the horizon, I decided to make a switch from my beloved Intel i7-860 + Asus P7P55D, giving up hyperthreading, to AMD Phenom platform and chose a X16/X16/X4 triple crossfire supported motherboard by ASRock - 890FX Deluxe5. I did lose some money in this whole deal, but I wanted to give this platform a try.
ASRock is the first company to offer AM3+ socket motherboard. And it comes with a ton of features, software, and a couple of bloatware items. Not cool.
Packaging: 10/10
You may have never seen such a packaging given we are talking ASRock and not Apple! That's all I have to say.
Unboxing: 9/10
Slightly tricky to take the motherboard out without damaging the cardboard box because the flaps are stubborn to open up. I managed it, though.
Motherboard first impressions: 9/10
Except a couple of seemingly bent capacitor heads, all the components look like they are made of high quality. The board looks really good.
Second impressions: 7/10
If you want to use two graphics cards in first two X16 PCIe slots, you will not be left with any PCIX1 slot. I had to sacrifice my X-Fi xtremegamer sound blaster card. Of course you wouldn't want to put your graphics card in the third X4 PCIe slot! Extremely bad placement for the first two PCIe slots. The second PCIe1X slot also gets covered by the second graphics card, which immediately renders it useless.
Powering up: 1) 1/10, 2) 10/10
First board was dead on arrival. Second time it booted up with display straight away. No issues there.
Features on board: 8/10
onboard reset, reset cmos, power button and Dr. Debug are excellent. The whole heat dissipation design also should work as expected. The sound card sounds decent but unfortunately I lost the ability to route the same sound from rear channel as I used to do with Creative X-Fi. Anyone knows how, from Realtek HD?
Soft features: 9/10
Except for that Zynga bloatware, the board comes with handsome overclocking, USB3.0, etc. etc. ton of features. The drivers installed in a flash and the UEFI bios is nice to work with.
CON:
- Please be very careful installing AMD CPU and heatsink. When I was pulling out my CPU first time when I came to know the board was dead on arrival, for the life of me I couldn't remove the heatsink because it was stuck to the CPU possibly with an air pocket. Never seen such a thing happen with Intel, really. And when I pulled with some force, the CPU came out!! without the lever opened!! isn't the lever supposed to lock the CPU in place? maybe this is a defect?
- One year warrant? Are you really serious ASRock? with this kind of failure rate, a minimum of 3 year warranty is a must.
ASRock is the first company to offer AM3+ socket motherboard. And it comes with a ton of features, software, and a couple of bloatware items. Not cool.
Packaging: 10/10
You may have never seen such a packaging given we are talking ASRock and not Apple! That's all I have to say.
Unboxing: 9/10
Slightly tricky to take the motherboard out without damaging the cardboard box because the flaps are stubborn to open up. I managed it, though.
Motherboard first impressions: 9/10
Except a couple of seemingly bent capacitor heads, all the components look like they are made of high quality. The board looks really good.
Second impressions: 7/10
If you want to use two graphics cards in first two X16 PCIe slots, you will not be left with any PCIX1 slot. I had to sacrifice my X-Fi xtremegamer sound blaster card. Of course you wouldn't want to put your graphics card in the third X4 PCIe slot! Extremely bad placement for the first two PCIe slots. The second PCIe1X slot also gets covered by the second graphics card, which immediately renders it useless.
Powering up: 1) 1/10, 2) 10/10
First board was dead on arrival. Second time it booted up with display straight away. No issues there.
Features on board: 8/10
onboard reset, reset cmos, power button and Dr. Debug are excellent. The whole heat dissipation design also should work as expected. The sound card sounds decent but unfortunately I lost the ability to route the same sound from rear channel as I used to do with Creative X-Fi. Anyone knows how, from Realtek HD?
Soft features: 9/10
Except for that Zynga bloatware, the board comes with handsome overclocking, USB3.0, etc. etc. ton of features. The drivers installed in a flash and the UEFI bios is nice to work with.
CON:
- Please be very careful installing AMD CPU and heatsink. When I was pulling out my CPU first time when I came to know the board was dead on arrival, for the life of me I couldn't remove the heatsink because it was stuck to the CPU possibly with an air pocket. Never seen such a thing happen with Intel, really. And when I pulled with some force, the CPU came out!! without the lever opened!! isn't the lever supposed to lock the CPU in place? maybe this is a defect?
- One year warrant? Are you really serious ASRock? with this kind of failure rate, a minimum of 3 year warranty is a must.
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