Opinions about this MB: ASRock P4V88+

xProg

What are your opinions about this motherboard ? A guy from my city is selling it for 35$. I'm living in Republic of Moldova (EUROPE).

Judas

it's ASrock, personally i wouldn't touch any board by them...

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xProg

Why ?

Judas

i've seen far to many of the boards fail or just underperform... capability issues...

Essentially the ASRock boards are nothing more then a cheaper design, component based version of an Asus board, less support, less of everything. They are cheap for a reason.

Course anythings better then the prebuilt boards. It's just personal preference, I have a very hard time trying to justify these cheaper boards because i've seen the end result. Course like anything, you could get lucky and find that it lasts years and years with no troubles, i just wouldn't take that chance.

Now you haven't provided any alternative options you were looking at, also you haven't set a budget (i'm guess this is quite low considering), Nor have you provided any specific needs or what your looking in any board. Just a opinion on the board itself,.... so i'm unfortunately, unable to provide an alternative or anything else of value, IF you value my opinion.

but i'm just one... i'm sure there will be others around that'll be able to provide far more valueable information.

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OldBuzzard

I'm using an Asrock board, and am quite happy with it. I even managed to OC my 4800+ to within an eyelash of 3.0Ghz without any trouble at all. I probably could had gotten 3.0 if I woud have bothered to play with the voltages. However I may have just been lucky with this particular board, as Asrock are not known for, nor are they in general, intended to be highly overclockable. They are designed to be lower cost mainstream boards, and they perform quite well at STOCK settings.

If you want to OC the snot out of everything, then that Asrock board is NOT one I'd recommend. For general usage, it should work fine.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

xProg

I have a Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0ghz and I don't know what to do with it . Also I have a Geforce2 mx/mx400 that stays in my cupboard , a operating memory (512mb), a hdd (40gb) and a PSU with 250W power...these parts must be in use...

Oh, I forgot ! If I will put a Radeon HD 3650 AGP on that board, there will be any conflicts between the videocard and MB chipset (VIA) ?

Mac Daddy

Just make sure all the chipset drivers and the VIA drivers are up to date from the ASRock site. I am running an old Northwood Celeron on a cheap ASRock board and as mentioned it works ok as long as you don't expect to much .... this is the computer I use to surf when my main rig is tied up with testing or in pieces

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

Liqourice

I have no idea how the intel boards from Asrock are but I've had GREAT experience with the two AMD Asrock boards I've had. The last one, with an old NF3 chipset, easily overclocked my Phenom 9850 to 3.2GHz and had no issues whatsoever, just as good as my current Asus board. I thought it wasn't so good since I could never get my old 5200+ higher than 2.86 with that board but since I've tried that cpu on two high-end expensive boards and had the same results I had to verify that opinion.

Don't know about less support either. They release BIOS updates a lot more frequently than many other manufacturers as an example.

Cheap isn't always bad, just like expensive isn't always good.

No, I don't agree with you. There's nothing wrong with Asrock in my experience and I've heard others being happy with them as well.

xProg

OK, thanks guys. I'll buy this motherboard and see what can it do

xProg

I bought this motherboard, installed and it is running without problems with 2gb ram, pentium 4 3.00ghz prescott, video hd 3650 agp...cool..

kris23

lol good way to use spare parts, nice!

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Mac Daddy

Cool stuff xProg my older system was made up pretty much of spare parts too

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

CDsDontBurn

our systems are fairly similar there. how does your 3650 run in that machine? can you do a quick 3Dmark06 run for me and compare your score to mine? my score is in my siggy.

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Tipstaff

Personally I'm a little worried. VIA and AMD (ATI) don't usually get along all too well. Nvidia isn't a problem, but ATI... never had much success with the mix.

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Mac Daddy

Oddly enough I have never had a VIA/ATI issue running an X1950 on the ASRock board I am running my older system. Same deal on another system I had running a Radeon 9600 on a VIA chipset mobo ... maybe just lucky

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

xProg

Ok, I'll give a try..

xProg

3DMark 2006 at default settings:



PS. This motherboard is much stable than my very very old EPoX...

I'll do a little overclock on my CPU and GPU...and see another result..

Judas

i've never ran into an issue with ati and via either.... however creative and via.... was never a good mix....

Via i found to be a pretty good setup... never liked thier sata or raid implementations mind you......

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Tipstaff

VIA and PCIE ATI I've never had an issue with, VIA and AGP ATI however... that's a whole different story. There's always some kind of tweaking I have to do with the AGP bus in the bios, or some setting in Windows I have to do to stabilze the system.

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Mac Daddy

My Sapphire X1950 was PCI-E the 9600 was AGP of course but really never had any issues with it under VIA. I have seen threads full of issues regarding ATI(AGP) and VIA but like I said must have been lucky myself.

I never really minded VIA the trick is to always keep the drivers up to date as well as your BIOS version and chipset drivers. As for Creative .. well they have issues with everything from crappy drivers and support to bad caps and I will never buy another one of there products.

The only thing I can recall having issues with on my old VIA system was the ATAPI drivers for the CD drive not sure what it was. Maybe the OS, VIA, the drive .. they hated each other lol

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"My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance." - Tim Allen

CDsDontBurn

hey man, thanks for this info! . our scores are 269 points apart from each other.

Now, i know you said that this was at default settings, so i'm going to say that you did not disable anything in terms of improved image quality settings where possible. your CPU is also 200Mhz slower than mine as well which are probably the reasons why your machine gave this slightly lower score. what i'm wondering right now is how much more improvement will there be if you were to increase the clock speed by 200Mhz to match my 3.2Ghz prescott. also, i'm not sure that if when i ran my benchmark that i did just a generic run w/o any of my performance tweaks applied to my system or not.

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xProg

Here's another result...


Maybe your GPU is little bit powerful, i think...

Judas

again i have to say that after dealing with the Via 100 and 133,266,333,400 boards from various manufacturers.... i used nothing but ATI AGP cards in all of them and again, never had a single hitch or glitch with any of them.

In all the boards, i usually used TOP PERFORMANCE or optimal settings, with a few adjustments to the agp to get as much speed out of it as possible without adjusting the clocks. Fast writes and the works.

Smartguart for ATI would also always seem to adjust settings automatically for me that worked. While sometimes fastwrites would be disabled, the speed of the cards were always respectible or comparible to other machines.

ati radeon 7000's right up to the last AGP card i really had in one of those machines being a 9800pro

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