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ASRock joins the X58 crowd

by on17 November 2008

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With the SuperComputer...

It's never easy to pick a good name for your products, but we're not sure where ASRock is going with its new X58 motherboard. ASRock named its upcoming board SuperComputer, which we have to say sounds really cheesy, as the board doesn't really look that super.

Despite the name, the board has a few interesting features that set it apart from the products ASRock normally makes. The board uses 8-phase power regulation for the CPU and there are only solid capacitors to be seen, which is more than we expected to see from ASRock, as the company usually sticks with the most basic of designs.

The slot layout consists of four x16 PCIe slots and three PCI slots, which seems strange, especially as two of the x16 slots can only be used when you have all four slots in x8 mode. ARock has also added an IDE port for those that still use it and the front connectors are located unusually high up on the board, just in front of the memory slots.

Around the back ASRock has also added a novel feature which we've only seen on notebooks so far, a combined eSATA and USB 2.0 port. The rest of the ports consists of six USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a FireWire port, two PS/2 ports, 7.1-channel audio jacks and optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.

We're not so keen on the color scheme and the chipset cooling looks fairly basic, but at the right price, we can see ASRock selling a few of these boards, although this is unlikely to be one of the more popular X58 boards, despite the fact that it's expected to support 3-way SLI.

You can find some pictures of the board here
Last modified on 17 November 2008
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