ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 R5.0 Motherboard Review

Chipset Features


Many people overlooked the P31 chipset thinking that it was nothing more than a slimmed down or “budget” p35. In some ways this is true; after all it only officially supports 1066FSB and DDR2 800 rather than 1333FSB and DDR2 1066 or even DDR3. However, what many people fail to realize is that ASRock has many years of practice in tweaking Intel's architecture and teasing more speed and CPU support from it. In this case ASRock was able to get the P31 to support 1333FSB and DDR2 1066. This is a very laudable accomplishment and gives an otherwise fallow architecture new lease on life.

However, in many ways ASRock’s P31 is a budget architecture since it has been paired with the older ICH7R southbridge chipset. This means that on paper it’s number of USB ports, and SATA ports that are supported are actually less than the venerable and older p965 architecture. Though real world results usually have very little to do with paper results, and people interested in entry level systems are probably not going to miss these extra bells and whistles. After all, how many people really are going to run more than 4 USB devices of the back of the motherboard or even run more than 4 SATA devices? Only you can decide the first one and we’ll get to the SATA question in a moment.

The upside to ASRock using a tweaked P31 is it allows you use any Intel CPU that is on the market, including the 6850, Q6600 or even the QX9650 without breaking your budget. Though if you can afford a $1200 cpu I am sure your budget can stretch for a couple extra dollars on the motherboard end of things!


The 1394a connector was a nice touch and provided a nice easy way to transfer files from an external enclosure to the system. This option worked perfectly and was just as fast as an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe FireWire port. All FireWire connectivity on the ASRock motherboard is controlled by a VIA VT6308S chip.


The Winbound W83627EHG controller chip is responsible for all legacy PC I/O peripherals such as the MIDI port, and this is the chip that the “SuperIO” section of the BIOS controls.