Why I bought an ASRock 990FX yesterday
 

The following will seem like I'm singing ASRock's praise but I'm not - someone else did. I can't sing praise since I haven't received my ASRock 990FX mobo yet. But this seemed more than important enough to warrant being posted. Quoted from a feedback at Newegg.com

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Other Thoughts: this is a great board and overclocks amazingly well... the UEFI is spectactular and ASRock support is amazing. i had an issue with BIOS update not working with my mouse and they immediatley replied back multiple times with different BETA drivers for me to test to see if they fixed the issue... which they did in only 2 days, GREAT JOB ASRock

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Just one question for ASRock: When will you be selling high end graphics cards with transferable warranty { 8^ D

I was really impressed with the Z68 PRO3 I just did a build with. Had every option my much more expensive Asus has, and for $25 less than the Asus LE with it's crippled UEFI. I'd rank them right along Biostar in the affordable board market. Actually I'd go so far as to say if you're spending under $150 on P67/Z68 pretend Gigabyte, Asus, and MSI don't even exist. Was not impressed with any of their boards in that range.

ASRock support is really good and is totally opposite to ASUS. Service reaction is fast and they often offer beta bioses to fix some problems ( that are actually working ). Even if they don't have good bios then you can expect that they add fixes quite fast if it's well known issue ( like no more than a week ) ... while for ASUS support it takes a week only to answer for 1 mail, if they even care to answer ( last time I made 4 mails while for 2 I got no answer ).
I had 3 P67 ASRock boards this year and all were really good. I also like Gigabyte but not some of their P67/Z68 boards. There is not much more on the market anyway ;)

I suspect no one will question your Asrock decision. It is your 990FX decision that will get a number of questions from this crowd. AMD is just getting killed in the bang for the buck department by Intel at this point in time.

Both Asrock and Biostar are VERY underrated. They both pack a ton of performance and features for the price, and my experience with Biostar USA customer service has been nothing short of excellent.

no question here ,Asrock is or was part of ASUS at one time.They have great techs working there.....Good luck with with the board.:toast:

Even my cheap Asrock board I was really pleased with http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?model=m3a770de

Cost £35 cheapest dual pci-e board I had access too ( next step up was £60) and it simply performed, obviously I couldn't run extra voltage through it but the features it had were brilliant for the price.

So I've no doubts they're a good brand.

I can agree with Biostar being underrated, for sure.


AsRock has yet to send me a sample, so in my opinion, there's something seriously wrong with their products if they will not send me a sample.

At least Gigabyte, who doesn't answer my emails any more either, has an obvious reason. For the number of people questioning/asking for AsRock product reviews, you'd think they might want to increase their exposure here a bit...

Biostar has been fantastic to me, for sure.

Which 990FX board, the Extreme4 or Fatal1ty?

I got an ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 last week for my first ever new generation Intel build, and I am highly impressed by the stability of the board, and all the features. My ASRock A770DE+ let me down though. I bought it as a cheap board for my ancient Phenom 9750 and OCZ 4GB DDR2, and within a few months of very intermittent usage the board hangs up after a few minutes. Tried swapping RAM and PSU, no difference. I might bring it back out this weekend and see if there was a problem I missed. Haven't bothered RMAing a $53 board lol.

I'm not sure why you said this? Do you do professional motherboard reviews?

Biostar has a 990FX board [BIOSTAR TA990FXE for $115 shipped], has the same basic specs as the ASRock 990FX Extreme4 I just ordered but the NB cooler is like most other makes in this class of board - too skimpy. Also, the Biostar website says this board does XFire but I failed to find out (anywhere) if it also will do SLI. I spent $50 more for the ASRock for the beefy NB cooler with fan, the features, build quality, the pleasing aesthetics the gold caps and other colors produce, and the customer service/tech support - as well as the few feedbacks I managed to find - they were excellent, especially when it came to OCing

He does the motherboard reviews for the site you are on right now. He's awesome at it too imho.

then I need to heed carefully what he said. Thanks ...

yeah i run Biostar too, they have nice stuff but the price tag is still friendly :toast:

As DamnSmooth said, yes, I do "professional" reviews, of course, for TechPowerUp.

I am working on a review of that Biostar board right this moment. Will probably go live next week. And no, it does NOT support SLi. The rest of my opinion of that board you'll have to wait for the review. ;)

I wll say, that most of the extra $50 was for the SLI liscence, more than likely. i do not know how much that liscence costs, exactly...probably not all of that number. Biostar, quite obviously to me, is centered around entry-level products. You always need to think about that when looking at thier products.

Biostar. The P67 Extreme they put out was probably just a hair behind my Gene-Z as my favorite board for 1155. This was after testing 7 other significantly higher priced boards. It clocked my 2600k higher than any other board I tried.

I mostly agree here. However, Biostar is trying really hard to break away from the "entry level" label. They are just keeping costs down on premium products by limiting a couple of features that only a few will be looking for. I think it's a smart move, and they are gaining some enthusiast clout these days. They are starting to remind me of the old DFI.

well its a little strange reading my own review haha... but i still stand %100 by what i said in my newegg review, i went through 2 BETA bios to help resolve my PERSONAL issue with MY mouse, they even went out and BOUGHT my mouse so they could reproduce the error... no one else is really that personable, great service from ASRock.

Got the mobo today, and it failed to post to windows. With no SATA drive/HDD connected it made it to the BIOS screen but whenever I did a reboot it would say "can not find map". So I connected a HDD figuring it would boot from Windows 7 but it gave a HDD NULL message and would not boot to the HDD so I did an RMA. These days, if a board can't self-boot to windows, I give it the boot ...

Build quality looks excellent, easiest DDR3 sockets I ever pushed a mem stick into, awesome NB/VRM cooler but be careful to not grab the VRM section - it will collapse the fins if you squeeze it, really liked the Reset, Bios Reset and Power Buttons (nice clicky feel to them), it's a very handsome board that was boxed second to none and it comes with a boat load of accessories but ...

Too bad it didn't post to windows /8^(

I now find myself wondering less, why ASRock wouldn't send a sample to TechPowerUP for testing ...

No offense man but that's silly.

I've had Asus and gigabyte boards turn up not working.

I've had corsair ram that's arrived DOA twice.

Stuff like that happens.

+1, just RMA it. This can happen with anything.

Every manufacturer has their share of faulty products. Can't see how you would connect that to whether they send us a sample. If you check our reviews, you will see a number of manufacturers are more "difficult" to form relationships to get review samples. Asus tends to be the most willing to hand out samples, along with Biostar. From what I've heard, Gigabyte use to be stingy with review samples, but have been much easier to work with recently.

Ironically, the only boards I've ever had to RMA were Asus boards.

He says that becuase that's what I say. If I don't get products from an OEM, then I must exclude them from being viable options for purchase.

I also consider bad products not viable for purchase.

Correlation say then that products I do not get as samples are bad.


Of course, I'm going to wrong about that more often than not, but really, I'll never recommend a product I haven't tested myself. If I cannot recommend it, users should not buy.

:D



:roll:


Of course, youi re very much right, but you know, before the Bulldozre launch, i said many times, that if TPU did nto have a review on launch day, then Bulldozer wouldn't meet expectations. That turned out to be very true...I've got a pretty good track record currently for stuff like that.

here's my 2 cents, and then I'll say no more about it in this post

yes, I was indirectly saying there has to be a reason a manufacturer would not take advantage of free product recommendations/advertising.

Over and over I read feedbacks that say, "DOA" or "Good, while it worked for a few hours" and IMO the fix is simple:

spend more on prevention technologies and testing time and less on fancy retail boxes (I know, I know, it seems folks today would rather feel good while opening the box than actually having the item work out of the box) but ...

Many enthusiest consumers, at least that I know, want value for the dollar and they buy online so retail boxes mean little regaridng the decision to buy. But having a 30% or higher out of the box failure rate will definately not help sales.

As a prior component level repair tech for Hewlett Packard (test instrumentation) my re-repair rate had to be maintained @ 1% or lower. Now THAT's quality control.

A quick scan of motherboard/graphics card feedbacks at Newegg.com will inform that there's a problem when it comes to "out of the box", "short lived" reliability and customer service issues:

MSI 990FXA-GD65 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ...

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s US...

I can list a bunch here but why bother when we can go to Newegg.com and read them for ourselves?

Here's something that might be of interest ...

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Out-of-box failures are typically caused by the following issues:

1.Faulty components that were used in the product but not detected by quality assurance
2.Storage induced failures, such as oxidation in high humidity environments
3.Transportation induced failures, such as vibration induced looseness in connectors
4.Configuration induced failures, for systems configured to customer specifications, but where the configuration of parts is incompatible
5.Customer induced failures, from improper setup of the unit

Impact:

Out Of Box Failures will significantly reduce customer perception of quality, and greatly escalate warranty costs

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_box_failure

"Out Of Box Failures will significantly reduce customer perception of quality"
"Out Of Box Failures will significantly reduce customer perception of quality"

Now, about this "warranted only to the original buyer" crapola ...

My first and only one ASRock board ATM (AliveNFSP-VSTA) was a fiasco, only lasted 1 year before stopped working altogether. Then I bought my current board with the same memory, CPU and PSU used in the previous board and all was fine again.

Despite that, I like ASRock: cheap, powerful and full of features, because I've never judge a company for one bad product like many people does. I have plans to buy that ASRock combo board AM3 with DDR2 and DDR3 slots.

It's funny that you mention this part. I bought a "dead" board from a friend for $15 (Gigabyte AM3 board, the one in the family pc in my sig) and RMA'd it with no problems straight back to Gigabyte. Perhaps it depends on the manufacturer, but I didn't run into a snag.