Asrock have unveiled its new Gen3 line of motherboards, offering pre-emptive Ivy Bridge support as well as a number of features suggested by pro-gamer Johnathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendel, who turned out to support the launch event as well as thrash a few journos at CounterStrike.
At last weeks launch event, Asrock were keen to highlight the fact that they were leading the market with a number of features including support for Intel’s forthcoming Ivy Bridge chipset and PCIe 3.0 architecture. So keen, in fact, that the powerpoint presentation at the launch was festooned with such zingers as ‘Asus Out’ and ‘Giga-bye bye’.
Nonetheless, the hardware itself had some interesting points. The early lead on Ivy Bridge is a good move for Asrock, especially as they can now claim to be the first to actually put out compatible hardware.
However, many of the additional features such as PCIe 3.0, which offers higher bit rates, bandwidth and frequency, won’t actually work with any chip other than Ivy Bridge. So a Sandy Bridge processor mounted on this motherboard will only offer PCIe 2.0.
Other features mentioned were the inclusion of the Nvidia NF200 chips, which allow for three-way SLI, XFast LAN data streaming prioritisation support, and the addition of the Fatal1ty mouseport, which allows the user to overclock their mouse.
Gen3 is probably one for the future-proofers at the moment but when Ivy Bridge actually comes out, which – if the GM of Intel Ireland is to be believed – will be late this year, it’ll be a real scorcher.
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