ASRock M3A770DE Motherboard - AM3 socket notes

A good AMD motherboard should have at least  the following features: 4 DIMM slots and an AM3 socket. This ASRock M3A770DE motherboard meets those requirements. Other notable specs:

4 SATA, 2 eSATA.
2 PS/2 ports
0 COM ports
No onboard video.
3 PCI - but one is blocked by Floppy connector and CDROM analog audio in port.
Instant boot - software addon that speeds up WinXp/Vista boot time.
Core unlocking support.

Price (4-25-10): $60 from newegg.

ASRock is a spinoff of ASUS, so they should be relatively trustworthy.

The big plus of this board is the price. The minus: 2 less SATA ports than most, and no COM port (most don't have these anymore, though).

Tweaktown has a review. It doesn't really say much you couldn't tell from reading the specs.

Newegg customer reviews are mostly positive. Out of 74 reviews, the only negatives that showed up were

  • The raid support is not very stable
  • One person had lots of stability problems that sounded like a bad MB
  • One person had a heat-sink pop off.
  • 3 people had the board fail within a few hours of first use (I wonder if it is heatsink problems?).
  • One person found that a CPU which could be core-unlocked on another MB would not unlock and run without crashing on this one (plenty of other people comment that core-unlocking did work for them). 

Sounds like a reasonably high quality board, especially given the price. On the other hand, $25 more buys you an ASUS MB of similar specs + 2 more SATA ports.

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