Dear AsRock;
I've owned an ASROCK X48 TURBOTWINS WIFI mobo for the past two years. It's served me pretty well; great overclocking capability, good expansion and peripheral support, and the ability to run both DDR2 and DDR3 RAM, which came in very handy. That said, it does have several drawbacks, so here's a list of problems I've identified with it, and some other things I tend to look for when I buy a motherboard (this list only applies to high-end enthusiast motherboards, other market segments will obviously have different priorities).
- A flexible BIOS. The ability to reliably control different aspects of how the motherboard operates is a must. I found with my motherboard that the BIOS did indeed allow me to control most things, but in a very imprecise manner. For example, with the exception of the CPU and RAM voltages, most were labelled "LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, HIGHEST", which obviously isn't very informative, and kind of scary when you know setting one of those voltages too high might brick your processor.
- Sensors. I discovered during my adventures overclocking my processor from 2.66 to 3.5 GHz that the voltage specified in BIOS and the actual voltage could differ quite a bit, for example, my current configuration has CPUV at 1.4000 Volts, but it runs at 1.285 Volts because the CPU draws so much power. Unfortunately, the only sensors available to me are fan speed, CPUV and CPU temp, which makes overclocking RAM difficult, because although I can specify a RAM voltage in BIOS, I have no idea what it's actually running at.
- Expansion Card Ports: When I look at any motherboard, I look for the following things in the expansion card ports. PCIE x16 ports should always be seperated by at least one slot, preferably by either a PCIx1 or PCI slot, because modern graphics cards take up two slots, so chances are whatever you put next to a PCIx16 slot will not be used. There should be at most two PCI ports, and probably only one, because PCIE has been around long enough that most people have replaced their legacy PCI devices. There should be at least 2 PCIx16 slots for graphics and one x8 or x4 (that won't be covered up by the graphics cards) for some other high-bandwidth device, like a RAID card, and at least one free x1 slot besides that for a sound card.
- Onboard Sound: either make it excellent, on par with a $100 after market card, or get rid of it. For enthusiasts who want decent sound, having a crappy onboard sound card is completely useless; I've never plugged anything into mine. If you must, provide the bare minimum (line in and 2 channel output), so people who don't care about how things sound aren't completely screwed.
- USB 3.0 is a must, having at least two USB 3.0 slots would be great, but given the lack of available devices currently, one would do. After all, the kind of person willing to shell out for a high end motherboard is also likely to get something requiring USB 3.0 before most other people.
- You can get rid of the floppy port now, the only thing I can think of that required a floppy in the last 10 years was installing RAID drivers on Windows XP, which became obsolete when Windows 7 came out, not to mention the fact that they're hard to even buy anymore. Anyone who still needs to get data off floppies probably already has a machine that can do so.
- Keep a PATA channel, people still make devices for them, and there are plenty of old DVD/CD drives using PATA that can be recycled. Obviously you don't need 2 PATA channels though.
- The more SATA ports the better. Anyone who wants lots of storage and doesn't want to spring for a RAID controller could easily eat up 4 SATA ports with hard drives, with another 2 for optical drives, another two for SSDs, and then perhaps another for a hard disk backup. More users, especially high end ones, are using multiple hard drives today because of the advantages - and disadvantages - of flash drives (also, make them SATA 3 so they're future-proof against faster flash drives).
- Try to put jumpers and sockets (fan, SATA, etc) in places that won't be covered by cards or coolers. This seems kind of obvious, but there are jumpers on my board I have to use needlenose pliers to change because they're stuck between the CPU heatsink and the soundcard. Better yet, get rid of as many jumpers as possible and just use BIOS settings.
- Consider putting cooling fans on the Northbridge on motherboards sold for overclocking. Just because a regular heatsink works when it's running at spec doesn't mean it will still work when the Northbridge has been overclocked and the case is 20 degrees hotter from all the other hardware.
- Onboard LEDs to show POST status are always helpful. The usual method of PC speaker beeps works just fine for people who have a PC speaker attached, but very few third-party cases come with one. Also, enthusiasts are probably more likely to encounter POST problems than most other people.
- Clearer labelling for ports. Printing it in size 6 font on the PCB is pretty useless, I always have to open the manual and look at the pictures if I want to figure out what's plugged in where. This especially applies to the pins for buttons and LEDS (power, hdd, reset, etc), which only work in one orientation and are never keyed (even a little white dot at the base of the pin where the white wire goes would be immensely helpful).
- More DIMMs are always welcome, although I realize it's hard to fit everything on a standard ATX board format. You could consider making some in the Server form factor, with perhaps 2 CPUs and 12 DIMMs (that would be quite something).
Those sum up the main problems I've had with motherboards in the past, and ASROCK in particular. Keep up the good work with the excellent overclocking capability and well-balanced features.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram