ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 R5.0 Motherboard Review

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ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 R5.0 Motherboard Review​

Manufacturer Product Page: ASRock Motherboard - Product - 4Core1333-eSATA2 - Overview
Product Number: 4Core1333-eSATA2 R5.0
Availability: Now
Price: Approx. $105CAD
Warranty Length: 1 year



ASRock Inc started in 2002 as a subsidiary of ASU has long been known for producing reliable entry level motherboards, at competitive prices but lately they have been branching off into a bit higher-end products. Let's face it, not everyone is willing to spend two hundred or more dollars on a motherboard that is dual-GPU compatible and can overclock a processsor like no tomorrow. In fact most people are more than willing to spend a lot less and get a motherboard that does what they need as long as it is completely stable, and if they need an extra “bell” or “whistle” they just buy a few aftermarket parts. Being successful in this market means a manufacturer has to know exactly what a particular market niche needs, wants, desires and most importantly can deliver it at a reasonable price. In the past ASRock has shown an uncanny ability to read the market place months in advance and deliver exactly what their customer wants at exactly the right time and sell it at the right price.

Just a few short months ago ASRock was spun off from Asus, went public and became its own company. While the ownership may have changed, their philosophy of producing stable, value-oriented motherboards based on older chipsets certainly has not and this holds true for the motherboard we see here today. The subject of this review is ASRock’s new Core 2 Duo (LGA 775) ready motherboard called the “4Core1333-eSATA2 R5.0”. This motherboard is based on a heavily tweaked Intel P31 & ICH7R chipset architecture, and has been modified so it can support just about any C2D processor from the older 800MHz FSB to the newer 1333MHz FSB CPU’s. Interestingly enough it is also purported to be “Wolfdale” ready though we have yet to test that claim.

The naming conventions ASRock uses for their motherboards is very straightforward and in this case 4Core1333-eSATA2 basically means that this product is compatible with all 1333Mhz FSB (and below) processors which includes Quad Cores (Kentsfield) and it comes with a built-in eSATA port. That being said, with a price of about $105CAD it is set up to compete directly against some very popular budget motherboards like the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L even though this ASRock has quite a few more features.

Will this board meet the needs of its intended audience, and more importantly is a $100 board still a “value oriented” board or does it cross over into the “enthusiast” level?

 

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Specifications

Specifications

[*]LGA 775 for Intel^® Core™ 2 Extreme / Core™ 2 Quad / Core™ 2 Duo / Pentium^® Dual Core / Celeron^®, supporting Quad Core Yorkfield and Dual Core Wolfdale processors<o></o>
[*]Intel^® P31/G31 + ICH7R Chipsets<o></o>
[/list]

• Compatible with all FSB1333/1066/800MHz CPUs
• Supports Dual Channel DDRII800/667 x 4 DIMM slots, with max. capacity up to 4GB
• Supports ATI™ CrossFire™
• 1 x PCI Express x16 slot
• Additional AGI Express slot to adopt 2nd PCI Express x16 VGA card, and other PCI Express x4, x2, x1 interface cards
• Untied Overclocking : During Overclocking, FSB enjoys better margin due to fixed PCIE/ PCI Buses
• Hybrid Booster - Safe Overclocking Technology
• Supports PCIE Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
• Supports 2 x IEEE1394 ports (one port on back panel, one header on board)
• 4 x Serial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and Intel^® Matrix Storage), NCQ and AHCI functions
• 1 x eSerial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s (shared with 1 SATAII port)
• HDMI_SPDIF header, providing SPDIF audio output to HDMI VGA card, allows the system to connect HDMI Digital TV/projector/LCD devices.
• 7.1 CH Windows^® Vista™ Premium Level HD Audio (ALC888 Audio Codec)
• Windows^® Vista™ Premium 2007 Logo Ready
• ASRock 1394_eSATAII I/O Plus: 1 eSATAII port, 1 x IEEE 1394 port, 4 ready-to-use USB ports

 

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Packaging & Accessories

Packaging and Accessories

The motherboard itself comes protected in a colorful cardboard box that is done in ASRock’s seemingly standard light blue-green colour scheme (some would call it “seafoam green”). The front of the box is literally covered with the various connections and standards that this board supports which is backdropped against ASrock’s iconographic fighter jet zooming from right to left. One thing that is for certain this is a very flashy, attention grabbing box. Some people would say that it crosses the line from flashy into garish, but at least it grabs your attention the second you see it. It does get the job done, and potential buyers can tell at a glace exactly what this board should be capable of. Overall it is a color and information scheme that has worked for ASRock in the past, and like the old saying goes “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”.

When one finally tires of looking at the box art and actually opens it, you are greeted to a loose assortment of various accessories on top of a white cardboard divider. This is a fairly standard packaging scheme and does give the board an extra layer of protection. After all, it is better to be greeted to a broken cable, a torn manual or even a broken CD than to a broken motherboard. When you do remove all the accessories and the cardboard divider you get your first glimpse of the board itself. The board is wrapped in an anti-static bag but this by itself would not be considered “enough” protection but the box itself comes in a bigger box that is protected on the bottom and four sides by high density foam. This makes for a cheap, reliable and secure package that can easily be shipped across the country with little worry of damage.

In typical entry level fashion the list of accessories that come with the board are limited, yet what you do get is very well executed. The manual is well organized and has step by step text with pictographs for each step of installation, BIOS options and even setup instructions for the motherboard’s myriad options. Ok maybe “myriad” is the wrong word, as there are not ten thousand options, but there is a surprisingly large number and considering the price range of this board some very interesting ones are included.

As expected a simple yet sharp-edge free I/O cover plate is included, as is an assortment of IDE and SATA cables. A nice touch was the inclusion of the nearly ubiquitous SATA power adapter that lets you use a standard a 4 pin molex connector to power a single SATA drive. Of course, this is marketed as a budget level board so only one is included. You also get a case badge, a CD containing all the necessary drivers as well as a PDF copy of your manual in English and Chinese. This was also a nice little touch as the manual is more likely to be lost over time than the driver CD and no one likes searching through their parts bin looking for a tattered old manual when upgrade time rolls around.

 

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Chipset Features

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.

 

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First Impressions

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.

 

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Ports and Connectors

Ports and Connectors

The biggest surprise you will have with this ASRock board is when you first see the I/O connectors. You not only get all the typical ones like keyboard, mouse, usb, but you also get a built in 1394a FireWire connector, a Gigabit LAN connector and even an eSATA port. It is curious why an e-SATA connector is included, as eSATA is far from the popularity levels of USB or FireWire but then again, this is part of the allure of this motherboard.

However, upon closer inspection you realize that this is not a true e-SATA setup. For this eSATA to work you have to first internally connect a standard SATA cable from one of the four SATA ports (the orange one to be precise) and then connect the other end into a SATA connector port located near the I/O ports. In other words this is just a built-in internal SATA to external e-SATA converter. It is not true e-SATA, and it does cost you 25% of your available ports.

Please understand that having eSATA is a great option for some future applications, the issue I have is that ASRock's implantation does leave a lot to be desired. It is quite conceivable that a person who uses eSATA, has just two hard drives and a single SATA CD/DVD drive would find themselves out of SATA connectors. This is a direct limitation of Intel’s ICH7 controller, and this is where this motherboard’s architecture does start to show its age, regardless of how well ASRock has tweaked it.

Another clue that this board is not geared towards any type of enthusiast is the inclusion of a single chassis fan header in additing to the CPU fan connector. Personally, I like plugging my fans into the motherboard when possible instead of having to snake the PSU wires through my case to get to the case fan connectors.

Another thing worth mentioning is that this board uses the older 20pin power connector and the older 4 pin older auxiliary power connector. This does ensure that any power supply will work on this motherboard but it may not provide enough power for the newer power hungry quads without some “v droop” or lowered core voltage issues. Luckily, ASRock includes a 4-pin Molex header to bring some much-needed power to the motherboard just in case you insist on using a more power-hungry processor.

One interesting feature of this ASRock board is that it supports ATI’s Crossfire technology. Even nicer is the implementation of it on this motherboard. On this board Crossfire does not require jumpers to be set nor does it cost you the use of the IDE connector which are all problems that previous ASRock boards reportedly suffered from. In general it’s a nice bonus but for the market segment this board is geared towards its usefulness is suspect. However, to further decrease its cost, the second pci-e slot is only a 4x slot and this can be a potential bottleneck if a customer did decide to use this board with Crossfire graphic cards.

 

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Installation

Installation

The installation of this motherboard was very straightforward and easy. In fact it was extremely easy in this case as I had just removed an Asus A8N32-SLI deluxe board from my case and had left the board standoffs in place. Except for this board being slightly shorter, and thus missing the last row of standoffs, the 4COre1333-eSATA has an identical hole layout as its ASUS “brother from a different mother”. As it is a short motherboard, even the most cramped of ATX compatible cases should have more than enough room for this board.

All the necessary cable connectors are clearly labeled on the motherboard and are explained in the manual. The only small and very minor annoyance was with the system panel headers, or to be more specific the power led 2 pin headers. On some cases this cable is a 3 pin connector that has the middle wire missing, but this motherboard requires the two pins to be next to each other. This is not too much of a pain since it is very easy to reposition one of pins so the 3 pin connector “hangs over” the edge of the headers. This may be an issue if you are inexperienced and/or this is your first build, since it can be tricky bending the plastic enough to remove the connector with out breaking it. Other than this minor issue, installation of the cables was very straight forward.

Installation of the Windows XP was also trouble free and went very smoothly. All missing drivers were located on the CD and by simply inserting the CD into your drive bay and clicking on the various options that appear in the popup window everything was installed without a problem. One interesting thing is that unlike ASUS CD’s there was no “1 click” option that you could select and let the system install, reboot, install, reboot, etc all by itself. Rather, you had to select each option one at a time, and let the system reboot and then start the process all over again with the next driver. This was a little more hassle but certainly nothing major.

As this motherboard does not include an onboard graphics core the CD did not have any graphics drivers on it to install. Of course, since you are expected to provide your own graphics card this should not be considered an oversight. I have heard people complain about this in the past on other similarly priced boards and the short easy answer is “buy a board with built-in graphics if you want the motherboard manufacturer to include the drivers”. After all if they did include drivers for both Nvidia and/or ATI they would then be tacitly agreeing to support said graphics cards…for free.

A very nice feature is the inclusion of Realtek 7.1 High Definition Audio. This feature worked surprisingly well, but did produce some noticeable “crackling” interference noise. This noise was most pronounced during hard drive seek and reads. One could easily tell when the OS or other software was accessing the hard drive just by the static it produced in “surround sound”.

On the positive side, the included software is intuitive and easy to use. You simply choose the number of channels you wish to use, whether that is 2,4,6 or 8 and it graphically represents (in colour code) what connectors have to go where. The software even allows you to setup virtual soundstages, which does a credible job of simulating different size and types of environments when listened too via Zalman 5.1 headphones. Overall, the included 7.1 HD sound is a nice addition but certainly not in the same league as an aftermarket soundcard.

 

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BIOS

BIOS

To enter the BIOS one has to simply press F2 during POST, wait for the system to finish its initialization and then you are greeted to a fairly limited, yet simple BIOS menu. However, the BIOS is the one area where this ASRock motherboard falls short. Once again ASRock as continued its tradition of using an American Megatrend BIOS that is extremely limited in its scope, features and options. The upside to this is that it is fairly simple and not overly complex. This can be considered a good thing if this is your first board and you have very little or no experience, as it will be difficult to hurt or damage your computer with a wrong setting.

On the downside its BIOS is can be considered very restrictive and is not very precise in its limited number of available adjustments. While I certainly was not expecting to see a BIOS where you can tweak just about anything and increase voltages in .1v increments; it was rather disheartening to see that the adjustments were not labeled in standard, concise terminology. Rather this board’s BIOS uses terms like “High”, “Middle”, “Low” and “Lowest” to describe important settings like RAM voltage. According to the manual high equals 1.99v, middle equals 1.90v, low is 1.81 and lowest equates to 1.71volts. Special consideration should be taken in selecting RAM for this unit as some higher end DDR2 RAM will only work properly at 2.1 volts, which this board is incapable of providing.

What was worse than this imprecise terminology is the inability to adjust CPU voltage. There is no option allowing you to increase core voltage above stock. So unless you are willing to do a “Conroe voltage pin mod” that involves connecting pairs of contacts on the bottom of your CPU, this board is will not overclock very well. There are even reports that this modification does not even work on p31 motherboards. This lack of options means you will only get what ever your CPU can take at completely stock voltages. It is easy to understand why this is done, and this is certainly not the first ASRock board to do this, it is just puzzling why they will give RAM voltage adjustment options (albeit in a very crude, imprecise way) but not CPU voltage adjustment. Hopefully, ASRock’s next board will remedy this oversight. On the positive side this board supports FSB speeds of up to 500mhz in 1mhz increments; so future CPU upgrades should be fairly painless.

All these BIOS quirks can be considered minor annoyances and as this board is geared towards the entry level market allowances have to be made. What cannot be overlooked is the fact that while this board advertises DDR2 533 support, you have to manually set jumpers on the motherboard to use it. In the BIOS your only options are “333” or “400”. This IS a budget level board and while PC2-5300 and PC2-6400 are reasonably priced PC2-4200 is very reasonably priced. We can honestly not remember the last time we had to set jumpers on a motherboard to specify ram speed. While we can understand why the BIOS is purposely restrictive we can not imagine why this oversight was allowed to make it onto a retail board, especially a board that is in the hundred dollar price range.

Before continuing I would also like to mention the sometimes puzzling behavior this board exhibited. When saving and exiting the BIOS, the system would immediately shutdown. This behavior was faster than expected but not overly disconcerting. What was disconcerting was approximately once every ten or twelve exits from BIOS the system would appear to “hang” for upwards of 30 or more seconds before rebooting normally. Luckily, we were patient enough to wait for it to reboot itself and that it did not do this the first time we exited the BIOS. It was completely random in nature and continues to do this to us to this day.

Even more puzzling was the fact that there is no true “factory reset” option in the BIOS. There is a “load optimal bios settings” option BUT this option turns of not only all USB & 1394 connectivity but also you LAN port as well. To me this is a less than optimal option, and can be very frustrating if you are unaware of its behavior. No one likes resetting the BIOS to factory before upgrading the CPU just to find that their mouse and network no longer work.

 

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Testing Methodology / WinRAR Benchmark

Testing Methodology

Processor: Intel e4600 2.4GHz & Intel Q6600 2.4GHZ
Motherboard: ASRock 4Core133-eSATA2 R5.0
Memory: 4GB G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ PC2-6400 CL5-5-5-15
Graphics card: Evga Geforce 6200
Hard Drive: 1x Western Digtal Se16 500GB
Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-620HX 620W
Case: Coolermaster CM 690
Case Fans: 6x 120mm Scythe “E”

In these tests you will see that the dual core e4600 was able to overclock to 2.6Ghz on this board. We will be presenting you with the performance figures for the e4600 at stock, with a 100Mhz overclock and with a 200Mhz overclock. In addition, we will also be running one test with a stock Q6600 for a quick comparison between quad and dual core processors on this ASRock motherboard.

Before get to the test results we would like to mention that this board is a definitely cool running board. Regardless of FSB and even under full load the motherboard temperatures stayed below 19°C. The combination of multiple 120mm fans and effiecent heatsinks does keep it the motherboard temperatures very reasonable.


WinRAR

The popular compression program winRAR includes an internal benchmark program that measures the performance of its decompression and compression algorithms. It does this by using an intensive worst-case scenario set of data. This benchmark is great for comparing processors of different size, speed and even cache sizes as it does not scale linearly with number of transistors or cache that a given chip has. WinRAR 3.71 was used and it was allowed to run for 5 minutes before results were recorded.

As you can see the e4600 did post some very respectable numbers. More importantly the quad Q6600 does highlight that while this ASRock board is a budget board it certainly doesn’t limit the CPU.

 

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7-Zip / PCMark04

7-Zip

7-Zip 4.57 was used for this benchmark and all settings were left at default except for number of passes which was set to run for 8 full passes. Only after 8 passes were the results recorded.

Just as winRAR showed, the P31 architecture does allow for very reasonable numbers.

This is where a quad core really shines and does prove that while the the p31 is older technology ASRock certainly has made it into a very decent system.


PCMark 04 (Virus Scanning)

All options were left at their default values.

This test was chosen as it doesn’t just show the power of the CPU, rather it underlines the power and efficiency of the system as a whole. More importantly and unlike the previous tests which stressed mainly the RAM and CPU (and thus the P31 chipset) it also stresses the ICH7 controller as information is passed across the bus from the hard drive to the memory and cpu and back again.

These are quite good numbers and while the ICH7 may be older technology it certainly is not bottlenecking the system either. Of course this test has not been optimized for a multi-core system and this does explain the less than sterling result of the quad core Q6600.