Hi there Guys, for a while now " like 6 years :/ " i have been relatively negative towards ASRock products. now recently iv been hunting down some parts for a friends budget gaming build and iv come across a couple motherboards by ASRock that are extremely competitive when it comes to bang for buck. Now this has raised the question in my head why do i actually dislike ASRock so much!? So iv done some research and read a couple articles on ASRock and discovered there history and so on and have come to the conclusion that possibly ASRock is on an upwards move and actually has some great products to offer and i guess this brings me to my question. What is your opinions on ASRock?
They are okay. I'm using the ASRock Z75 Pro3 in my personal build. It isn't a great motherboard for overclocking or upgrading, but it gets the job done. It has held up well for the past few months. I was able to crank out a 4.4 GHz overclock on my 3570k. The temps on the motherboard itself were a bit high for my liking, so I decided to back it down to 4 GHz.
If you plan on buying one of their boards, I suggest buying one the higher quality mobos (Extreme4 or greater).
Asrock boards are fine, as long as you buy theire semi / highend ones. on the intel side Extreme 4 / 6 and up.
AMD AM3+ side you need to be carefull with asrock boards. depending on the cpu you will gonne use. for a powerhungry 8core i would only recommend the Asrock 990FX extreme 9 or fatality pro.
But Asrocks better boards are not that much cheaper then similar Msi or Gigabyte or Asus boards anymore.
I dislike AsRock because when me and some of my friends originally built our computers, we were all on a tight budget so we had various AsRock boards because they appeared to be the best price/performance. Out of the 4 of us that bought AsRock boards, 3 of them died within the first 6 months. We have all since switched to Asus and Gigabyte boards without problems.
I would strongly advise against any of their boards sub Extreme 6, I am unsure if the issues have carried over to the Z87 platform but to use the Z77 Extreme 4 as an example
the MOSFETS are crap, its using old D-PAK MOSFETS, The D-PAKs were phased out years ago on higher end motherboards because of their lack of performance compared to newer components like PowerPAK and LF-PAK and they can cause a lot of heat, you can find them on a few sub $80 motherboards and some of ASRocks Z77 baords the Extreme 4 included
Then you have the 8+4 phase design, the issue here is that they are linking two phases to each other, so it is a big 4 phase VRM made to look like a 8 phase VRM with additional inductors
Another thing to be found in that is the ISL6367 which controls the VRM is an analog PWM while ASRock advertises the PWM as digital
Though generally their higher end boards tend to be more expensive than a better solution from the 'top tier' mainboard manufacturers (Asus, Gigabyte and MSi) which makes them somewhat difficult to recommend though in all fairness they are somewhat well featured and if you can get a good deal on them they are certainly worth considering
I built my first computer with a Asrock motherboard and it worked fine for as long as I had it the only problem I had with it was it could never read one of my hard drives as master no matter what I did. I don't know if it was the bios or what but that was the reason i gave it away.
Thanks Guys thats really helpful and has confirmed my suspicions on the whole topic, i have always preferred Asus Motherboards over anything else and have only ever built systems with Asus and MSI. So for now i think ill keep it that way, Im interested to try a ASRock at some stage so Who knows i might give them a chance at some point.