Asrock 4CoreDual-VSTA
- Thread starter Timdog
- Start date
Dont let the 4x pci-e slot put you off too much. Physically its a 16x slot just electrically limited to 4x, however in benchmarks it's only 5% to 10% slower than a full 16x slot.
If you have older peripherals ie; ddr ram and agp graphics this board will tide you over with a modest overclock (normally around 290fsb, possibly a tad more if you're lucky) until such a time as you can afford a full upgrade.
If you have older peripherals ie; ddr ram and agp graphics this board will tide you over with a modest overclock (normally around 290fsb, possibly a tad more if you're lucky) until such a time as you can afford a full upgrade.
This board can be regarded as a useful option as a stepping stone to the full-blown DDR2/PCIe system.
I have one myself and it will eventually be relegated to my son's system.
I am delighted with the board whilst understanding its limitations - the chipset is significantly slower than any of the current NVIDIA or Intel ones.
It really depends on what you have now. I went to this with an e4300 from an Athlon XP2600+ which I had never managed to get much above stock. The difference in things like encoding is outstanding and the overall "feel" of my system is a lot brisker.
As has been said, there is an FSB limit of around 300, but this is still a "modest" 50% overclock which is not to be sneezed at by any means.
To sum up this apparently endless ramble - as long as you don't expect miracles the board offers a flexible upgrade path at a very reasonable cost - particularly if you will be able to reuse it in a second rig for another family member.
I have one myself and it will eventually be relegated to my son's system.
I am delighted with the board whilst understanding its limitations - the chipset is significantly slower than any of the current NVIDIA or Intel ones.
It really depends on what you have now. I went to this with an e4300 from an Athlon XP2600+ which I had never managed to get much above stock. The difference in things like encoding is outstanding and the overall "feel" of my system is a lot brisker.
As has been said, there is an FSB limit of around 300, but this is still a "modest" 50% overclock which is not to be sneezed at by any means.
To sum up this apparently endless ramble - as long as you don't expect miracles the board offers a flexible upgrade path at a very reasonable cost - particularly if you will be able to reuse it in a second rig for another family member.
hmmm its in my basket with a 6600 
if only i had my own debit card
wouldnt have to convince my mum that i need it
*edit*
just noticed 2bg ddr2 is only 63 quid
havin some of that
any way to unlimit it?
if only i had my own debit card
wouldnt have to convince my mum that i need it
*edit*
just noticed 2bg ddr2 is only 63 quid
havin some of that
ron3003 said:
any way to unlimit it?
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Nicos Rex said:
I currently have an AMD XP 1800+ with 512MB RAM and I find my system slows down when running a few things like internet, watching Freeview via my TV card and listening to MP3s etc. I am thinking of getting the Asrock 4Core Dual as I don't play games and can just re-use my AGP card and get 2GB of DDR2 memory with an E2160/E4300/E4400.
Does your Core 2 Duo system or anyone else's system stand up to "normal" uses like above? i.e multitasking on PCs in the past has been nigh on impossible IMO.
I do encoding (AVI to DVD format) from time to time and using ConvertXtoDVD takes about 2+ hours on my current system. Does anyone have any figures for their improvement in encoding with the C2D chips?
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Bernie_Li said:
At a guess, if you went dual or quad core you would see anywhere from 4-10 times faster speeds.
Athlon XPs at the same clock speed run slower than Athlon 64s. If you went dual core on an Athlon X2 you'd see double the clock speeds, and double the cores, so you'd see at least four times the performance.
Add to that Intel are currently faster than AMD, and you can go quad core instead of dual core, and you're looking at significantly faster.
although I just picked up an e2160, i think that the e4400 is your best bet. As mentioned above, the FSB is limited to around 300Mhz (although i've seen it higher with volt mods) so if your overclocking, you'll want that 10x multiplier so you can squeeze out those extra Mhz.Bernie_Li said: