ASRock AliveNF6G-DVI Motherboard

Introduction:

    In today's lineup we have another M-ATX motherboard based on the NVIDIA NF6100 chipset, which features the North Bridge, South Bridge, and integrated GeForce6-class graphics DX9.0 VGA, and Pixel Shader 3.0. Which motherboard am I talking about? The motherboard in question is the ASRock AliveNF6G-DVI. This small form factor motherboard packs a lot of features into a surprisingly small area, such as the ability to overclock, integrated graphics, and DVI expansion card. Not to mention it's also the first AM2 motherboard to be Vista Premium Hardware ready. In order to have that, the motherboard needs to have 512mb x 2 dual channel memory, plus many other features too numerous to mention in just the intro. So let's move on to the review....

Packaging:

Retail front

Retail rear

Open box

    The front of the box is spared from being overloaded with fancy graphics; instead, it's covered with those little icons describing all the features of the AliveNF6G-DVI motherboard. The back of the packaging is all about RoHS, or The Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) 2002/95/EC [1], which was adopted in February, 2003 by the European Union. The RoHS directive took effect on July 1, 2006, but is not a law; it is simply a directive. This directive restricts the use of six hazardous materials in the manufacture of various types of electronic and electrical equipment. It is closely linked with the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) 2002/96/EC which sets collection, recycling and recovery targets for electrical goods, and is part of a legislative initiative to solve the problem of huge amounts of toxic e-waste.

Contents

DVI Card

DVI Plug

Manual/driver CD

    That's the outside of the box, so what's on the inside, you ask? The contents here included one SATA cable, one Molex to SATA power adapter, rear panel I/O cover, one FDD and IDE ribbon cable, Serial port cable in PCI bracket, DVI Graphics-SI card, one HDMI_SPDIF cable, installation CD, and manual. Whew! That sure is a lot of stuff for a M-ATX motherboard.

A Closer Look:

Full View

AM2 ZIF Socket

    Following my simple routine in reviewing motherboards, I will begin with the CPU socket and work my way around the motherboard. The CPU socket is AM2 (of course) and has some tall electrolytic capacitors close by, two right between the CPU socket and RAM slots. Some lower profile heatsinks may not work well here, so choose wisely.

4 RAM slots

Hardware controller

FDD/IDE header

    Next up are the RAM slots: four 240-pin DDR2 DIMM slots which support DDR2 533/667/800, with a total capacity of 8GB. The IC next to the RAM is the Hardware Monitoring Controller Winbond W83627EHG-A,  which can handle these functions: Multi-I/O, UART, infrared, parallel port, keyboard controller, game port, MIDI port, and general purpose I/O ports. Next to the I/O controller is the game port header, and next to the DIMM slots is a single IDE and FDD header.

   Moving on around, we come to the BIOS chip which holds the AMIBIOS. Next, we have a host of connections, starting off with four SATA2 connections. Then there are three USB headers which make up USB ports 5 thru 9, and below this is the front panel header. Lastly in this corner is the NVIDIA MCP61P (NF-6100-430) chipset, which just happens to be the North Bridge, South Bridge and GPU all on one chip.

    The MCP61P is the premium product out of the three forms of the MCP61 line-up. This supports one PCI Express x16, two PCI Express x1, standard definition video output, Gigabit Ethernet, 10 USB ports, four SATA2, RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and ASF 2.0 management. It's also the only member of the MCP61 family to have a sDVO output for external video-output capabilities, such as DVI, component and TV-out. The MCP61P will have a graphics clock of 425 MHz.
 

Expansion Slot

HDMR Slot

    Continuing the tour around the motherboard, we reach the PCI expansion slots. Starting at the bottom, the slots include one HDMR slot, one PCI express x1 slot, two PCI slots, and one PCI-E X16 slot. Also here is the front panel audio header, HDMI_SPDIF (High-Definition Multi-media Interface,) and CD Audio-in header.

PS2/Parallel/VGA ports

USB/LAN/Audio ports

    The last stop of this little tour is at the rear panel I/O connections. Here we have two PS/2 ports, a parallel port, a VGA port, four USB ports, 10/100 LAN, and a six-port audio connection.