ASRock Conroe 1333-DVI/H Motherboard Review

Bundle And BIOS

The Asrock Conroe 1333-DVI/H comes with a bundle that is just enough to get you up and running. It has your SATA, floppy and IDE cables, your SATA power adapter, as well as your backplate, DVI riser card and all the necessary documentation and media needed to get up and running.

A quick look at the bios shows us that Asrock went with an AMI bios for this board. Remembering who this board is for, it should not surprise you to hear that there are not a lot of frills in the bios, so we will just look at a few of the more interesting things in it.

The advanced settings page is where most everything of interest will be.

The CPU configuration page gives us the options for our FSB adjustments, as well as some of the other common options that are found on boards for our CPU.

Overclocking can be set to run your CPU and ram in sync and async mode.

As you can see here, the FSB has the ability to be set up to 500fsb. This is way overkill for this board, as you will see in our overclocking section.

Here on the Chipset Settings is where we find the controls for our DDR. Notice, the only options for the ram are DDRII 400/533/667. This was pretty disappointing, but once again, there is not a great need to have high speed DDRII in an HTPC. You also have the ability to set all of your primary timings on this page, as well as a few other settings.

The last page we will look at in the bios is the IDE config page. Pretty simple and self-explanatory.

Let’s move on!