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Review

Please keep in mind this is subjective!

Released around 2012, this motherboard is about 10 years old now, although at first glance you may not know that. The board has a fairly sleek, understated design. It uses a dark brown PCB, with mainly black parts. The exception being the CPU socket, capacitors, chipset heatsink, rear I/O, built-in buttons, and SATA ports. Most of these are silver or gray, which still blends in pretty well. There are no LEDs on the motherboard, or any headers for them, aside from the power LEDs.

Moving away from aesthetics, the board supports FM1 CPUs and APUs, along with DDR3 1866, or 2400+OC according to ASRock. The CPU is this biggest limiting factor for this board, given they are based on the K10 design, and come in quad-cores on the high end. These CPUs are over 10 years old at this point, and just wont keep up with many modern workloads. That does not mean they are useless, just not ideal. Most likely, the 32GB RAM limitation is not going to be an issue for most people, and neither is the older PCIe 2 when you consider the CPUs you can run.

What holds up pretty well is the rear I/O. Given the 4 USB3 ports, HDMI, 7.1 audio, gigabit Ethernet, and eSATA, you could be forgiven for thinking this is a much newer board than it is. There are no ports here that can not be found on newer boards, aside from the VGA, which is hard to come by, but not impossible. There is also DVI, 1 PS/2 mouse and keyboard port, SPDIF, FireWire400, 2 USB2 ports, and a clear CMOS button packed into the back too. The port selection is pretty nice, but I would have liked to see 2 or more extra USB ports added.

Where the board lets down a little is the front expansion. There are 3 USB headers, giving 6 USB ports for the front, but they are only USB2. This can be excused for the time though, as there were still may boards with only 2 USB3 ports on the rear, if any at all. The chipset itself is limited to 4 USB3 ports anyway, and while some may have preferred 2 USB3 in the rear and 2 USB3 in the front, I can't fault ASRock for putting them all on the rear.
There are also 5 SATA3 6Gb/s ports, which is still standard on many boards today. The newer boards usually have m.2 as well, but that is not as common as SATA yet, so for many people, this is not a problem.

The board also supports crossfire, although I really doubt that would make any sense today. It does have a debug LED, built in power and reset buttons, and that clear CMOS button, which are nice to haves. There are also 2 4pin fan headers (one for the CPU), and 4 3pin fan headers (one also for the CPU), which is a welcome addition.

For software, this board officially supports Windows XP, Vista, and 7. That's it. Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 should run without any major issues, and 11 could probably run if you try hard enough too. Linux should work without problems, and would probably be the best bet anyway, given the hardware. If you run Windows on this, you do have access to the ASRock Extreme Tuning utility, which I find quite nice. It seems to have a pretty good interface and feature set, especially for an FM1 platform board from 2012, but it does look a little dated by today's standards.  

The UEFI BIOS is another win for this board in my book. It again, looks a little dated, but aside from that, is not bad. It has a great layout and many options too. The overclocking is easy, the fan adjustment is a breeze (pun intended), monitoring is also great. I really don't have much bad to say about the BIOS.

To conclude this mini essay of a review, for the time, this board seems to be a mid to high end FM1 board. At roughly 90 USD in 2012, it sure wasn't the cheapest option. It looks nice, and seems to use high quality parts too. Solid state caps, among other things, show its a higher end board. While I wouldn't recommend you go out and get one of these boards for your next build, if you come across one for cheap, I think it is still a solid board. Just don't expect it to play the latest games, or do too much heavy lifting. 9/10 in my book.

Board Features