Good for them. Funny thing is, ASROCK are innovators, albeit, in an unusual way, e.g. their combo boards that allow either DDR and DDR2 or AGP and PCIe.

Hope they bring some of this type of innovation to the "high end".

i expect Asrock will just sell rebranded asus boards for a slight decrease in price.

I thought ASrock was owned by ASUS? I also though ASrock already made high end boards or used to?

Yes ASUS bought ASRock, but seems they are still doing their own stuff. Their boards have always been budget ones, lacking mainly in bios/voltage department. When you can't put more than 1.9v to memory, it doesn't matter how good the board is. Sure people volt modded the heck out of these puppies as there was only so little to lose, if you fried the board.

Used to have Dual Sata-II s939 board from them. When it came out no other cheap motherboard had SataII in them and it was the time to go from AGP to PCI-E. Just had PSU incompatibility, memory incompatibility and finally GPU incompatibility when I went to PCI-E. So I ended up getting an Abit Nforce4 Ultra as a replacement. Price was double but everything worked what I took out of the ASRock board to the Abit one.

It was a good board, if you had compatible stuff plugged in it. Will fallow what they come up with, but won't be the first to jump back to them ;)