First Impressions


If it is one thing in that ASRock is known for it is their consistency. This layout and colour scheme is classic ASRock and in fact has been used on many of ASRock’s previous Intel boards. There is nothing wrong with that as the layout is elegant and nothing is blocked or appears crammed in as an after thought. More importantly this recycling of the design layout does allow ASRock to save costs on retooling and anything that can help keep motherboard prices down has to be considered a good thing.

As with all motherboard manufacturers ASRock has followed the trend of only including one IDE connector. Yes this is a limitation of Intel’s ICH and while it would have cost more to include an additional IDE controller, it would have been nice to have seen one. It is a minor oversight but in the budget end of the market IDE CD/DVD burners are still very prevalent and for that matter so are PATA hard drives. While this is certainly a minor issue and nothing to worry about, it is just curious why ASRock didn’t feel the need to distinguish this board from its competition by including a secondary IDE connection for the budget users.

Even though ASRock did quite well laying out the 4Core1333 the 20-pin ATX connector is placed in the most horrible location. This placement can be a real pain especially if you have a bottom-mounted power supply where the cable would likely have to snake over your GPU.


Since the P31 and ICH7R are very cool running chipsets, an overly complicated (and expensive) copper heatpipe cooling solution is not necessary. These moderate size heatsinks are all that are needed to keep the chipsets cool and running trouble as long as you don't expect to throw more voltage at them. Once again, ASRock has gone for an elegant “minimalist” solution instead of a flashy one.


While the colour combination used for the RAM is an acquired taste, it does do its job well. There is very little chance of mistakenly placing the ram in the wrong slots. As a nice touch this chance is further reduced by the fact that the retaining clips on slot 1a and 1b are larger than the ones found on the secondary slots. This attention to detail leaves a very good impression, even if the yellow and orange colour combination can leave a lot to be desired.


One thing that does stand out on this board is the fact that it is literally covered with the older “electrolytic” style capacitors. In the case of this board they are OST capacitors. On entry level boards it is still quiet common to see this style of capacitor still in use, however “solid state” capacitors have started to trickle down to the entry level boards. It would have been nice to see ASRock follow suit and continue this trend. It is doubtful that the lack of solid state capacitors will cause a shortened lifespan, but it would have been a nice touch.