Cooling

ASRock is using only passive cooling on the motherboard. The Northbridge has a bigger heatsink, while the Southbridge heatsink is really tiny. During our overclocking tests the Northbridge cooler reached temperatures of about 80°C, but without any effect on stability. We added a cooler to the heatsink and it did not increase the overclock, which means that the high temperature didn't lower the overclock in the first place.

Chips

Hardware monitoring is provided by Winbond's W83627HF.


As clockgenerator an ICS952505 is used.


For networking ASRock uses the Realtek RTL8201 10/100 MBit Ethernet controller. This is a very cost effective solution, but it certainly can't compare to much more expensive chips, for example from Intel.


The Realtek ALC850 Audio Chip is responsible for sound. Compared to nForce4 motherboards which use the same sound chip, the quality is a good deal better.


This is the first time I see the JMicron JMB360 SATA-II controller chip on a motherboard. Usually chips from Silicon Image are used. The JMB360 adds one 300 MB/s capable port with support for NCQ. For a board at this price, this makes a nice addition.