Is it just me, or is ASRock

That was one small generational improvement I was happy to see amidst the RGB “upgrades” of the same gen; despite all my rigs being horizontal, it’s nice to see competition yielding something useful

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I also have a X99 ASRock board. It’s been a truly great board apart from one annoying UEFI issue. Seemingly, every time that it boots, it enumerates the M.2 drive and adds yet another entry in the Boot Menu for my Linux install. When I hit F11 at boot time, there are about 35 entries for the same Linux install and one for W10. Fortunately, it defaults to booting Linux and I hardly ever boot W10, apart from a couple times a year, so it’s not like I have to see this annoying problem with any frequency.

Out of curiosity, what was the issue that you had with yours, which was finally resolved?

Anywhoo, back at the ranch, I agree that the explosion of plastic wings and scoops are quite annoying, as is the LED lighting. Fortunately the lights can, in most cases, be turned off. If anything, I’d rather see some meaningful anodized aluminum heatsinks mounted in the appropriate locations and let it go at that. The manufacturers obviously wouldn’t be doing this crapola if it didn’t sell, so I guess we’re screwed. Fortunately, some of them seem to be a wee bit more restrained with their workstation-class motherboards.

I was just trying to remember how we got here … how this all started. Was it the Gigabyte Sniper boards with the “magazine” and “rifle” shaped heatsinks, or was it someone else who perverted the course of motherboard aesthetics?

BTW, I’ve built more than a couple of gaming and general purpose PCs using SuperMicro boards, though I never used their “gaming” boards. If you value stability over overclocking, you could do a lot worse than SuperMicro. They also have the benefit of still looking like motherboards, too!

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That was another issue I had… For some reason switching from BIOS A to B worked but then I had to reinstall Grub from a Live CD via chroot.

If you don’t have another BIOS to go back to, using the jumper (if there is one) to reset the CMOS should do the trick. Taking out the battery would accomplish the same thing too I guess

I was actually about to add a post in my FrankenDebian blog about chrooting into a BTRFS install as it is a bit different than using another FS… I’m getting carried away now lol.

But anyway, try that. I’ve been looking for a way to backup the BIOS on B so I can flash it on A but haven’t found anything yet…

That was one problem I had but the problem I had the other day was that when I tried switching from EZ mode to Advanced mode or even tried booting from the boot menu, the BIOS would freeze and my cursor would literally draw in the menu. Seems resolved now that I’ve done all that though

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Interesting!

I don’t think my board has a backup BIOS, but I’ll check. It’s not a Taichi, like yours. I have updated the BIOS on several occasions, as memory and M.2 compatibility improvements were instituted, but with no joy. I’ve also cleared the CMOS on a couple of other occasions, usually when I get to about 50+/- boot entries. I’m not using some Chinese knockoff, it’s a genuine (as far as I can tell) Samsung M.2 drive.

I reported the issue on ASRock’s site and they didn’t seem to believe me. They wanted pics of my 50 boot entries. I posted pics and they said that they had never heard of it before. Like I said, I use that menu about 2x a year, so it wasn’t really high priority. Every time I see it, though, it’s annoying!

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Akchually…

ASrock was spun off was Asus in 2002, ASrock is owned by Pegatron and not Asus. Asus are their own company.

Pegatron was also spun off from Asus in 2010. So one yes both under Asus they are not any more.

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A grub reinstall might be in order then. I’ll make a post covering it later here: FrankenDebian

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I second the correctly executed cooling.
The question I ask myself is if customers really want all those “features” or if there are just no products without those “features”?

https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/gaming.cfm scroll down to the motherboards. They got a nice enough range in their style.

On that note, I really like the looks of the SuperMicro S5 case.

I’m running Solus, so I’m not using grub. Solus used to use the gummiboot loader, but for the past year, or two they’ve been using the clear boot manager from Clear Linux. I haven’t had any boot issues, so I haven’t done much reading on how it works.
Solus is on the M.2 drive, with its own boot loader and EFI partition.
W10 is on a SSD, with its own boot loader and EFI partition.
I have two other SSDs. One is loaded w/ Windows Steam games and one is loaded w/ Linux Steam games. I expect that there are EFI partitions on those drives, too.
I have another SSD for tinkering with other OS’s, with its own EFI partition (nothing on there at the moment).
I can remove drives without affecting whether some other OS will boot. All of the drives (except for the M.2) are mounted in an Icy Dock cage. I use the UEFI boot menu if I want to run something other than Solus. So all OS’s are standalone/modular and can be readily plugged in and un-plugged as needed.
For some reason, only the M.2 drive entry gets repeated in the UEFI boot menu over and over and over and …

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Asus went downhill when they crushed their Tuf brand into budget and not what it was originally

AsRock boards could look like a purple dump truck for all I care, as long as they fixed the tcpu/tctl motherboard temperature sensors for the latest Ryzen-Athlon 200 APUs.

I ain’t buying 355*

HOLY SHIT!

And WHAT? NZXT made a motherboard? Why don’t they do more?

I noticed this too. Just looking at the price. I thought it was a little on the cheap side when window shopping for a TUF board on Newegg.

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I also have an ASRock x99 'board, a Fatal1ty Professional Gaming i7. It’s got a bit of a gamer aesthetic from the red and black color scheme, but no RGB and other such accouterments. It’s been fairly trouble free, but the XMP setting gave my Haswell-E CPU’s IMC too many volts under load with the settings on auto with recent BIOSes. Be aware of that.

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Well it’s nice to read about discussion that X manufacturer boards are made by X or Y,
But that all isn’t really relevant at all.

What is relevant is the said component quality that is getting used on motherboards in general.
Those components are mostly third party and have nothing to do with said brand.
Like for example the vrm components, other electrical components, pch chipset, controllers etc etc.

The only thing with Asus and their pwm’s, is that Asus rebrands the pwm’s.
But Asus is a bit vague about this.
But they might have some deal on this with Infineon and intersil.
Still Asus has a decent bios doe.
The only thing i don’t really like about Asus is that all the unnecessary software they,
provide with their boards.
But of course you don’t really have to install it.

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It was for their own in house build service, so they likely don’t see the value in entering a market with all ready big names to compete against but this way don’t have to buy them in.

On the other side of it they were very meh feature wise, they worked and that was about it.

I want to like ASRock, but in Ryzen they’re doing some really weird slips, like this:


And this (that my very own AB350 suffered from):

Not only Asrock did this.
But Gigabyte and Msi aswell on the B series of boards.
And now days its getting more common to double up components on powerphases.

Thats such a despicable behaviour by these brands, and with ASRock this was on the X series, back when i stumbled around that video i had just gotten out of my AB350 and i was looking to buy the Master SLI, thankfully i did look around before buying it.

Well kinda depends on the way you look at it.
Doubling up components on a power phase isn’t actually that bad of an idea,
atleast wenn they done it properly.
Not the way Gigabyte did it on their B series boards atleast.

You could build a reasonably well vrm with mediocre components,
if you double them per phase.
It is getting more common now days.

But like with every scenario there are some pro’s and con’s to it.

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And sometimes its better to have a board with a decent VRM, decent BIOS and decent software instead of having a great VRM, terrible BIOS and bad software like my Biostar X470GT8, a great board hardware-wise crippled by software incompetence, for memory it practically only runs correctly on B-Die.

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With the latest beta BIOS for the Taichi from the beginning of this year I didn’t spot any changes to voltages. That certainly is strange. I don’t know why they’d tamper with stuff like that as the boards should rely with the 2133mhz 1.2v standard for DDR4 unless XMP is loaded… In which case the highest I’ve ever seen pulled is 1.25v.