[citation][nom]CaedenV[/nom]... First developed a bad ram slot after 2 months. Returned to ASRock and they had my replacement board at my door within a week! ... [/citation]
Indeed, their support is very good; direct email, and they've been happy
to answer my other misc questions over the years, often giving me info I
wasn't exepecting. One time I asked them about support for a XEON chip on
one of their consumer mbds; not only did they send me an unpublished beta
BIOS that would allow the CPU to be used, the guy also went out of his
way to explain how to install it, etc.
For a recent
3930K build I did for someone who uses After Effects, I
*almost* went with the Extreme11 because of its onboard SAS, but in the
end the price was just a tad too prohibitive, though as it happens the
user requirements were such that I realised later the SAS wasn't
necessary anyway (and in the meantime I'd managed to obtain an HP P400
SAS PCIe with battery backup for about 65 UKP). Having said that, I do
think the Extreme11 should have included at least a 51MB onboard cache
for the LSI SAS - it makes such a difference to performance of small-size
random I/O.
I had been planning on buying an Asrock board for my
2700K build, but by
sheer mad luck I managed to obtain an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme for the
lunatic price of 87 UKP, but if that hadn't happened I would definitely
have bought a Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 (almost ordered one before finding the
M4E).
I like the fact that Asrock's support people are happy to answer tech
questions, and at least the people I've talked to do seem to know what
they're talking about.
It's perhaps not surprising that ASUS often holds a slightly higher slot
at the top-end of enthusiast boards, that's long been their ROG legacy,
but it was interesting to note last year just how many sites used the
Extreme4 for parts reviews, and likewise before that how many used the
X58 Extreme6 for reviews (including toms btw), the latter inparticular
offered equal or better performance & features than the UD9 for about
half the price.
It's true that years ago Asrock tended to occupy more of the entry level
market segment, but their midrange and top-end products have come on
leaps & bounds in the last few years, easily a match for the competition
and often better, and the Extreme11 is a sure sign they're moving more
into the professional space aswell, which is good. I hope they start
doing multi-socket XEON boards, give some competition to Dell, etc.
f-14, all I can say is that low-end boards can be a total pain from *any*
vendor. Can't comment on what you say about support though, that's
certainly not been my experience (note that I was emailing with the
Asrock people in The Netherlands).
I also like the way Asrock has a somewhat more broader attitude to CPU
support on older mbds, eg. they added support for the Phenom II to their
AM2NF3-VSTA AGP board within minutes of the CPU's release (a nice boost
for someone with a 6000+ or less on an old board of that era), whereas
other vendors never bothered updating their older AM2 boards even though
in theory the Ph2 could have been used on their older products just fine
I have a few Gigabyte boards aswell, especially like the GA-X58A-UD3R for
its excellent XEON support, and I obtained a Z68XP-UD4 which works very
well. Ditto a few EVGA boards, etc.
Odd though, the only company I tend to avoid when buying mbds is MSI, but
I couldn't really say why...
Ian.
HTPC !
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