ASRock Motherboards

[ford prefect]

About 18 months ago, I needed to build a releatively low perfomance machine, mainly to keep backups of various media projects on. I didn't want to spend a lot, so I bought an ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA. This was before vista was launched, and to be honest it was a reletively cheap board available at some shop I happened to be passing.

Now this board has an nforce 3 250 chipset on it, which isn't really supported in vista. When installed, the onboard NIC doesn't work, AGP works at 4x's max, RAID doesn't work properly on it, and there are several other issues which I can't remember off the top of my head.

A collegue at work recently bought one of these off amazon, and ASRock are still selling these nforce 2 and 3 chipsets as Vista compatible.

I had to roll back to XP on that machine, which isn't a major problem for me, but I think its a bit crappy that they are still selling them, especially as the latest boxes apparently say "ASrock, an Expert in Windows Vista", and it has a big Vista logo on the box too.

 

[Yaka]

look at the manufacturer name

tilt yer head a bit squint at it

you come to realize it is actually called ARSECOCK

they have bad rep because they deserve it

 

[Kryten]

They're not all that bad, quality wise. All it is, is the "PC Chips" arm of Asus(tek) - so all the shite like dual DDR/DDR2 and PCIE+AGP combination boards get lumbered on Asrock label so the big guns dont get embarrased.

But theres not really much other choice for the "odd" combinations of hardware which help upgrade on a tight budget.

I always assumed VSTA was something to do with Vista personally, but was wrong. Nearly all their boards are labelled with that now and quite agree, shouldnt be :|

 

[Chilly]

marketing slyness, methinks.