In the world of computers, value priced hardware has had quite a bit of a bad rap for quite a while. In the early dawn of the industry, cutting costs meant cutting corners. In these later days, the procedure of cutting costs has come through efficiency, simple manufacturing, and limited bundles. Now, while ASRock has spent much of it's time in the former of these worlds, I happen to be able to confidently say that this board - the x58 SuperComputer is going to be a positive change on the pattern - a board with a good layout, plenty of features, and a nice low cost. The only potential catching point? We'll need to see how it performs. After all, if that ticket is in the bag, we may simply have a contender for the top slot!

Features:

Time to get this portion of the review out of the way.

1. Intel^® Socket 1366 Core™ i7 Processor Extreme Edition / Core™ i7 Processor Supports Intel^® Dynamic Speed Technology

2. System Bus up to 6400 MT/s; Intel^® QuickPath Interconnect

3. ASRock DuraCap (2.5 x longer life time), 100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors

4. Intel^® X58 + ICH10R Chipsets

5. Supports Triple Channel DDR3 2000(OC)/1866(OC)/1600(OC)/1333(OC)/1066 (6 x DIMM slots), non-ECC, un-buffered memory, Max. capacity up to 24GB

6. Supports DDR3 ECC, un-buffered memory with Intel^® Workstation 1S Xeon^® processors 3500 series

7. Supports Intel^® Extreme Memory Profile (XMP)

8. 4 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (blue @ x8 / x16 mode, orange @ x8 / N/A mode) (Double-wide slot spacing between each PCI-E slot)

• Supports ATI™ CrossFireX™, Quad CrossFireX™

• Supports NVIDIA^® Quad SLI™, 3-Way SLI™ and SLI™

• Supports NVIDIA^® Tesla Personal Supercomputer with three Tesla and one Quadro graphics cards

• Dual GLAN with Teaming function : 2 x PCIE Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s

• 6 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID10, RAID 5 and Intel^® Matrix Storage), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions (2 SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors can be used as eSATAII connectors)

• Supports 2 x IEEE1394 ports (one port on back panel, one header on board)

• Supports ASRock Instant Boot

• Supports Smart BIOS, ASRock OC Tuner, Intelligent Energy Saver

• 7.1 CH Windows^® Vista™ Premium Level HD Audio with Content Protection, supports DAC with 110dB dynamic range (ALC890 Audio Codec), DTS (Digital Theater Systems) support

• Windows^® Vista™ Premium 2008 Logo Ready

• Free Bundle: 2 x ASRock XFire_Bridge_3S Cards, 1 x ASRock SLI Bridge, 1 x ASRock SLI_Bridge_3S Card, 1 x ASRock 3-Way SLI Bridge Card

• I/O Panel : 1 x Coaxial SPDIF Out Port, 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port, 6 x Ready-to-Use USB 2.0 Ports, 1 x Powered eSATAII/USB Connector, 2 x RJ-45 LAN Ports with LED, 1 x IEEE 1394 Port, 2 x RJ-45 LAN Ports with LED, 1 x IEEE 1394 Port

Specifications:

There we go, with that little portion cut from the fabric, it's good and time to take a look at the layout of this board.