ASRock 775Dual-VSTA Motherboard Review

Introduction

July 12th is a day that many gamers and hardware enthusiasts looked forward to, it’s the day that Intel announced officially that they had the world’s fastest x86 processor. Looking over the review of the Core 2 Duo I’m sure many of you decided then and there it was time to take the plunge to the new Intel architecture. So here we are just over a month a later and Core 2 Duo’s are starting to fill the retail channel so I’m sure many of you are wondering what kind of motherboards are out there and what kind of features do they have?

Today we are bringing you a look at a rather unique board from ASRock, the 775Dual-VSTA. This board takes convention and throws it out the window by supporting AGP and PCI-E! Not content with it’s support of “older” technologies, it can also operate using either DDR or DDRII!! This is excellent news for those hanging on to their Athlon XP or Pentium 4c systems looking to upgrade to some serious CPU horsepower. The best part of this is that the board can be readily found at your favorite e-tailers for the bargain basement price of $56. You may be thinking at this price that you’d be better off sticking with what you’ve got, but don’t let the price fool you, this little board packs some serious punch. Of course to meet this price point some sacrifices were made but the important thing is that ASRock has given the mainstream user everything needed to have a stellar performing system.

Before we get into the specs of the board let’s take a look at ASRock as many of you may not be familiar with them.

ASRock Inc., was established in 2002 and is an energetic company with the combination of technology and humanity. They devote their efforts to bring customers innovative and reliable motherboards with the design concept of 3C, “Creative, Considerate, Cost-effective”, ASRock has successfully established a well-known leading brand of the best price-performance motherboard in the industry.

That’s one heck of a goal, so let’s see if ASRock can deliver on that promise with the 775Dual-VSTA.