[geeks] Intel Atom MB - Initial Impressions

[Mark]

>A single opposing datapoint -

>My gaming system is built around
>one of the ASRock boards that has
>both an AGP and a PCI-E slot.  It
>originally had an Athlon64 3200+,
>but now has an Athlon64 X2 3800+
>dual-core chip (at the time, was
>the best price-point drop-in
>upgrade that didn't involve a
>forklift).

For the sake of comparison one board I had was a S775 board that had ASRock's
cutely retitled AGI port for graphics cards. That basically translated to
'it's AGP but it only work with a list of 20 long-obsolete graphics cards'.
DirectX performance in games with an unsupported GF6600GT was poor compared to
the same card on the ASUS board that replaced it. Video playback crashed
Windows entirely.

The otherr was a Athlon 64 board that started turning the PC off at random.
Swapped everything else but no solution, was forced to tell my friend to start
saving for a new PC...

> ASRock is just ABit's lower-end
> stuff.

I'd only rate ABit as mid rate anyway, though 	've never had any problems with
*their* boards. It's hardly a surprise thar ASRock stuff comes out so bad
sometimes.

--

Mark