by Doors4ever
03/11/2009 | 09:08 PM
Unlike many well-known computer brands that started back in the past century, ASRock was founded not that long ago – back in May of 2002. Despite this relatively short period of time, the company quickly became recognized worldwide. At first, ASRock mainboards attracted attention due to extravagant combinations of seemingly incompatible CPUs, chipsets and various technologies. Then the company won the hearts of certain user groups due to their high-quality budget and mainstream solutions. However, in late 2007 we learned that the company was going to enter the expensive mainboard market. This information proved absolutely true: ASRock started offering solutions based on high-end chipsets, such as Intel X38/X48 Express that couldn’t be cheap by definition. At that time we didn’t have a chance to check out these new solutions, so we are going to correct this omission today, by reviewing one of the newest ASRock mainboards proudly bearing an impressive name of X58 SuperComputer. The name suggests that the board is based on the newest Intel X58 Express chipset and supports Intel Core i7 processors. However, let’s not reveal all the details here. We are going to start as always with the package and accessories.
ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard comes in a vertical box of relatively small size for a flagship product. It features a convenient carry handle. The exclusivity of the solution is stressed by “Limited Edition” words on the box:
There is a photograph of the board on the back of the box with brief description of its technical specifications, peculiarities and supported technologies.
Inside the box there is the mainboard itself wrapped in anti-static plastic and the following accessories:
ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard may seem quite ordinary at first glance, but this impression is certainly false. If you take a close look at it, you will notice a lot of unique peculiarities that make this board stand out among the competitors.
Look at the four graphics card slots. Only blue-colored slots can work at full PCI Express 2.0 x16 speed. Orange slots use only half of their contacts, which correspond to PCI Express x8 standard. They share 16 PCI Express lanes, so when there is a graphics card installed into an orange slot, the corresponding blue slot slows down to PCI Express 2.0 x8. ASRock engineers are especially proud about being able to double the space between the graphics card slots, which allows using solutions with large cooling systems and ensures good cooling for regular cards installed into these slots. This is a definite advantage. However, they had to move the chipset North Bridge and processor socket a little higher up in order to fit all seven slots: four PCI Express and three PCI slots. As a result, the LGA1366 socket turned out almost at the edge, which will make it impossible to use the whole bunch of large CPU coolers on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard if your system case is not tall enough, because they will hit against the system power supply located nearby. It is definitely a drawback.
Another drawback surfaced a little later, when we assembled the system. It turned out that electronic components on the reverse side of the PCB located close to one of the retention holes will not let us install the backplate for our Cooler Master GeminII cooler.
The processor socket has been moved to the very edge, while all five fan connectors that can be connected to ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard are grouped around the chipset North Bridge in the very center of the board, instead of being spread out closer to the mainboard edges.
By the way, the chipset North Bridge is cooled with an aluminum heatsink with large branched fins.
It is connected with a heatpipe to a heatsink over the processor voltage regulator transistors.
Unlike the chipset North Bridge, that is located a little higher than usual, the chipset South Bridge is situated unusually low. It is cooled with a small heatsink:
Intel ICH10R South Bridge provides support for six Serial ATA ports. Since Intel has long given up Parallel ATA support, the manufacturers have to install additional controllers in order to implement this feature on their boards.
As a rule, these chips provide not only Parallel ATA support, but also two more Serial ATA ports that are often laid out on the connector panel as eSATA. ASRock Company once again introduced a very unique approach: ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard uses a VIA VT6330 combination controller. Namely there are two controllers integrated into a single chip: one is responsible for Parallel ATA channel for up to 2 devices, while another provides two IEEE 1394a ports, one of which is available on the mainboard connector panel.
Besides, the back panel also has PS/2 Keyboard and mouse connectors, an optical and coaxial S/PDIF and six audio-jacks working via an eight-channel Realtek ALC890 HD codec with Content Protection, DTS (Digital Theater Systems) and DAC with 110dB dynamic range. There are also two network RJ45 connectors implemented via two Realtek 8111DL chips with Teaming support, six USB and one eSATA ports.
As for the eSATA, things are not as simple as they seem here, too. This is not an ordinary connector, but the so-called “Powered eSATAII/USB”. This is a non-standard connector combining eSATA and USB at the same time. The eSATA device connected to it doesn’t need additional power, because it receives the power from the USB. However, the USB receives not only power: it is a fully-functional connector that will work for any USB devices. It is a very interesting and smart solution. Some manufacturers, OCZ being one of the most well-known, have already started producing compact storage media with two interfaces: Powered eSATA and USB. If you use a “Powered eSATAII/USB” connector, the device receives power through this connector; if you are using a regular eSATA port, then you need to plug a power cable into a separate USB port, too. Now we just have to wait for the corresponding standard to be adopted, and in the meanwhile we can only see connectors like that on a few notebook models and ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard.
It took me a while to find the controller that provided support for the Powered eSATA port. I didn’t see anything resembling it near the connector panel, there was not mention of it in the technical specifications, and it wasn’t marked on the components layout either. Finally, when I saw JMicron drivers on the enclosed CD disk, I started looking for a JMicron controller and found it: JMB362 was located near the BIOS chip.
Now let's check out the USB ports on ASRock X58 SuperComputer. Let’s count USB ports on the back panel: there are six of them there. One more is employed in the combination Powered eSATAII/USB connector. That makes seven. Along the lower edge of the PCB we see HDMI S/PDIF pins, FDD connector, COM pin-connector, infrared module pin-connector, Clear CMOS jumper and, finally, USB and system speaker pins. So, the total is ten USB ports out of twelve provided by the chipset South Bridge. So where are two more ports? I was about to call it another discovered drawback, when I suddenly noticed a pair of USB connectors next to the memory DIMM slots. There was also a FireWire connector and a group of pin-connectors for front panel buttons and indicators.
Let’s count one more time: six USB ports on the mainboard back panel, one more port combined with the eSATA and five are available through onboard pin-connectors. That makes twelve.
To sum up everything we know about ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard, let’s use the specification chart from the official ASRock web-site:
The layout scheme from the manual will illustrate the location of the main mainboard components:
As you can see, ASRock Company continues to use a truly unique and inimitable approach to mainboard design. The new “Powered eSATAII/USB” connector is a definite advantage. Even if you don’t have a flash drive with this connector, even if it never actually becomes a standard, you will still be able to use it as a regular USB port. Other features distinguishing ASRock X58 SuperComputer from other mainboards are not so indisputable. The combination VIA VT6330 PATA/FireWire controller is OK. True, six SATA ports provided by the chipset South Bridge are enough in most cases, we don’t really need any extra ones. However, IEEE 1394 has almost become a standard. Although they couldn’t do it without an additional SATA JMicron JMB362 controller anyway.
Twice as big distance between the graphics card slots seems to be an advantage that many users of multi-graphics card configurations will like. However, it has been implemented at the expense of compatibility with large CPU coolers. I believe that there are more users out there who would be willing to install a larger cooler to improve overclocking or lower the noise than those who use multiple graphics cards, so I personally would consider it s drawback. The location of the pin-connectors for the front panel indicators and buttons as well as the fan connectors in the center of the PCB is also quite arguable. I am sure that there will be situations when the cables will just be not long enough.
Another arguable drawback is the absence of any LEDs on the mainboard PCB. I do not approve of those manufacturers who turn the board into a Christmas tree. I am usually annoyed with extremely bright or blinking LED indicators, but ASRock X58 SuperComputer doesn’t have any of them at all. I believe they could have left at least one LED indicator showing if the mainboard receives power at all.
So, as we have just seen, the functionality of ASRock X58 SuperComputer is totally up to the mark and it doesn’t yield to any other mainboard in this respect. However, as for the PCB layout, I would say it is below average, because there are too many chances that a potential user will have problems during system assembly. I have to admit that the originality of the components location is not always explicable in case of ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard.
ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard uses BIOS based on AMI code. The BIOS functionality is as unique as the board itself, so we will go in a little more detail about it. You need to press F2 on system boot-up to access the BIOS:
The “Main” section serves mostly informational purposes. Here you can set current date and time, check the name of the mainboard, BIOS version, CPU type and current clock speed, memory size and frequency. Nothing unusual here. However, I was very pleased with what I saw in the next section called “Smart”.
Long time ago some BIOS maker decided that all options dealing with loading the default settings or optimized settings should be located in the very last BIOS section. But why, if they are used frequently? And why ASRock was the only one who came up with an idea to make these standard operations automatic? Of course, once you figured out the BIOS structure and found the necessary sub-section and the specific parameter in it, you can switch your HDDs into ACHI mode yourself. But why take the trouble if you can do it in one easy move from one of the first sections instead of digging deep into the BIOS? All in all, we would really like to give ASRock quite a few extra points for creating this extremely useful “Smart Settings” section.
However, the functionality of “EZ Overclocking section” didn’t really impress us that much, although the description of the changes in the new BIOS versions suggests that the developers focused primarily on this section. “Load Optimized CPU Setting” allows you to apply all parameters necessary to overclock the CPU to the desired frequency from 3.6 to 4.0 GHz with 100MHz increment. The latest beta BIOS version L1.44 had an increased interval with 4.2GHz maximum frequency. However, it is done in a very rough manner: all processor power-saving technologies and “Turbo Boost” function get disabled, the multiplier is locked, the voltages get increased significantly and the base frequency is pushed to the necessary level. The “Load Optimized DDR3 OC Setting” works similarly, only here you can’t actually choose: all settings are adjusted to ensure that the memory frequency reaches 2000MHz.
Almost all parameters important for proper system configuring are gathered in “Advanced” section. The names of the sub-sections here will tell you about the settings they contain:
“CPU Configuration” sub-section tells about your CPU and allows adjusting the corresponding parameters.
“Chipset Configuration” sub-section has most settings. It allows changing the whole bunch of them – from frequencies and timings to voltages.
Most settings here do not need an explanation, their names indicate their functions clearly enough. You can notice that you can’t change the QPI bus frequency, because the “QPI Frequency” parameter is inactive. However, you don’t really need to change the QPI bus frequency during the CPU overclocking: the lowest multiplier will be used by default. Moreover, the latest beta BIOS version L1.44 already allows adjusting the QPI bus frequency, so we believe that this parameter will be unblocked in the next official BIOS release. I would also like to draw your attention to the “Intelligent Energy Saver” parameter. Until this day only MSI mainboards allowed enabling mainboard’s power-saving technologies right from the BIOS without any additional utilities.
This sub-section is relatively big, so some parameters have been moved to individual pages, so that it could be easy to work with all these settings. In particular, they moved memory timings adjustment to an individual page:
Voltages can also be adjusted on a separate page. By default they are all set to “Auto”.
Winding up our discussion of the “Advanced” sub-section, I suggest checking out “IDE Configuration” page where you can adjust the settings related to drives.
“H/W Monitor” section doesn’t contain too many functions. Among the indisputable advantages I should mention the board’s ability to control the rotation speed of all five fans that can be connected to it. Another great plus is the ability to adjust the rotation speed of the CPU fan right in the BIOS, but this feature will work only if the CPU fan uses a four-pin connector.
“Boot” section pleased us with the option to set a USB drive as a boot-up device. In this case the board will boot from any bootable USB flash plugged into any USB port.
Finally, the last section called “Exit” offers you to save up to three BIOS settings profiles. You can’t assign them any names or descriptions, but it is anyway better than nothing.
Overall, I would say that the theoretical functionality of the new ASRock X58 SuperComputer BIOS is way above average. We clearly see that the developers did their best to provide the users with all the functionality that other manufacturers’ mainboards have to offer and even added a few great bonuses of their own. As for the drawbacks, I would say it is not very convenient to use “+” and “-“ keys to go through all the settings until you find the right one. Far not all the settings have a drop down menu where you could pick the value right away, and there is absolutely no possibility to enter the value using keyboard.
We are going to test the new ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard on the following platform:
As I have already said, ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard is one of the flagship solutions. It costs about the same as the mainboards of the same kind from AsusTek or Gigabyte. Therefore, it is quite natural that we will be comparing ASRock X58 SuperComputer against one of these board, namely against Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme. We have recently reviewed Gigabyte mainboards: GA-EX58-Extreme and GA-EX58-UD5. Their functionality turned out almost the same and they made a very good impression.
Unfortunately, my excitement about the functionality of the ASRock X58 SuperComputer BIOS disappeared when I got to deal with it face to face. Let’s start with the “Smart” section that I liked so much. It turned out that the board works just fine in safe mode with the default settings, but failed even to boot with optimized parameters. In the meanwhile, we were promised an advantage of ASRock X58 SuperComputer over other mainboards in this particular optimized mode. We managed to partially solve the mystery of this optimized operational mode by replacing the Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 memory with other modules. It turned out that the board sets the memory frequency at 1333MHz in the optimized mode, and not to 1066MHz like other boards. True, in this case we will see that ASRock X58 SuperComputer does better in some tests than its competitors, especially in synthetic memory tests. But why doesn’t the optimized mode work for Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 memory remained a mystery. I did check that the board works just fine with this particular memory at 1333MHz when this frequency was set manually without any voltage increase or timings adjustment.
Speaking of the memory, we have to say that the board didn’t support the XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) technology. However, we could have guessed it from looking at the BIOS, since the board assumes that the memory frequency is 1066MHz for the first profile and 1600MHz for the second. However, we know from our Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 Review that the modules SPD contain respective 1866 and 1800MHz frequencies. As a result, no matter what profile we picked, ASRock X58 SuperComputer just wouldn’t boot.
However, the incompatibility we discovered between the ASRock mainboard and high-speed memory is not fatal. As we have just learned from ASRock directly, the company engineers are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it. Next BIOS versions will allow using XMP profiles and Performance mode with optimized settings in any configuration without limitations. At this time, however, users have to do a little work and adjust the settings manually in order to achieve higher performance.
By the way, the “Boot Failure Guard” technology that monitors the POST process and reboots the board in case of failure worked impeccably. Right after a failed boot-up or at least after several failed attempts the board would boot in safe mode and display a warning message offering to access the BIOS and correct the parameter settings.
It was especially pleasing, because the Clear CMOS jumper on ASRock X58 SuperComputer is not much fun to work with: it would reset all the parameters including date and time. If you have previously saved the profile in the BIOS, you will be able to restore the settings quickly. However, you will still have to change the date and times manually.
But let’s get back to the memory. It is not really a big deal that the XMP technology doesn’t work on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. It did work on Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme, but I still configured most of the parameters manually, because the board increased the voltages way to much in my opinion. However, it turned out that the maximum available memory frequency on ASRock mainboard was only 1333MHz. Even at 1600MHz memory frequency setting the board refused to boot, not to mention 1866MHz, which is the nominal frequency for the Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 modules. It was not enough to set the desired frequency and increase the memory voltage, Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme required an increased QPI bus voltage, too. The problem is that ASRock mainboard doesn’t know to adjust this voltage, there is no parameter like that in the BIOS. I suspected that “IOH CSI Voltage” parameter was the one, because the serial interface with point-to-point topology that is currently called QPI (QuickPath Interconnect) used to be known as CSI (Common System Interface). However, increasing this voltage setting didn’t help: the board still wouldn’t boot with the memory frequency set above 1333MHz.
Luckily, these were the only problems we discovered when we tested ASRock X58 SuperComputer in the nominal mode. If you do not choose the optimized mode but stick to the default one and then configure all parameters and technologies manually, the board works perfectly fine. The processor clock frequency multiplier and Vcore will be lowered in idle mode.
Under heavy load the multiplier will increase to 21, if you enable Turbo Boost.
We tested the mainboard in these conditions and compared the results against the performance of Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme also tested with default settings:
Overall, the performance of both boards in nominal mode is very close, which we have actually expected to see, taking into account similar settings. However, there are a few situations when we really can’t explain why one mainboard is faster than another.
We have already discussed Turbo Boost technology in great detail in our Gigabyte mainboards review, however, we discovered that it has been implemented differently on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. When the CPU works in its nominal mode, all mainboards act the same. Even under maximum load of eight computational threads, the processor clock frequency multiplier was increased to 21. When we overclocked our processor on ASRock X58 SuperComputer, the multiplier did increase to 21, but only when the number of computational threads was four or less. With 5 threads or more the multiplier reached 21 very rarely and was mostly set at 20. Theoretically, it looks more like the “correct” implementation of the Turbo Boost technology compared with Gigabyte mainboards, where the multiplier increases to 21 in all cases, even during multi-threaded load. We would really want to see the multiplier hit 22 if there is a single-thread load in place, but that would only happen for a split second, so we shouldn’t consider this fact. Let’s see, if we will be able to benefit from the “correct” implementation of the Turbo Boost technology on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard.
Strange as it might seem, but we experienced much fewer problems during CPU overclocking on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard, although everything began with a very frustrating disappointment.
“Overclock Mode” parameter in the mainboard BISO is set to Auto by default. It can be changed to Optimized, but in this mode the board wouldn’t boot, as we have already explained above. You can also set “I.O.T.” (Intelligent Overclocking Technology) and the board will automatically overclock the system by the specified percentage under increasing workload. In order to get access to the base frequency adjustment option, you have to set this parameter to Manual. We did exactly that, but the frequency wouldn’t increase and the CPU wouldn’t overclock. After playing with a few other setting I loaded Windows. You can imagine how surprised I was to find out that the processor core voltage was increased to 1.4V! Of course, its affected the processor power-saving technologies: the multiplier lowered but the voltages remained increased in idle mode.
I used to be very unhappy about Asus mainboards with very “smart” BIOS that wouldn’t let us overclock processors and keep the power-saving technologies working at the same time. Once the FSB frequency increased past a certain level, the BIOS decided that it was time to increase the CPU Vcore and from that moment on all Intel’s efforts in lowering the heat dissipation of their processors and improving their performance-per-watt came crashing down. By the way, soon we will be able to check out the performance and overclocking on a few new Asus mainboards. But things are actually not so good at all on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. You don’t even need to overclock anything: just tell the board about your intentions by setting the “Overclock Mode” to Manual and the board will bump up the processor Vcore just like that. Of course, you can protect yourself against too dramatic voltage increase by setting CPU Vcore at a certain fixed value, but it will not bring processor power-saving technologies back to life.
Sad. I sincerely hope that it is just a bug and not intentional take on overclocking as means of increasing the performance at any price. This approach also has its right to exist, processor power-saving technologies will be of no use to those who have their systems running under 100% load 24/7. You can also ignore power-saving if you don’t really care about long-term stability of the overclocked system, but aim only at a record-breaking number or screenshot. However, there are not too many users like that out there, and the majority needs their system to be quiet and economical in idle mode and ultimately fast under heavy load. However, the current implementation of the “EZ Overclocking” function makes us believe that ASRock took into account only the interests of the first user group and completely left out the second. I have to remind you that when you decide to overclock the processor to a certain frequency in the “EZ Overclocking” section, it immediately disables all processor power-saving technologies and Turbo Boost, locks the multiplier and increases the voltages excessively.
So, the economical CPU overclocking mode when the frequency increases, but all processor power-saving technologies keep working is impossible on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. And the only reason is because the board immediately increases the voltage as soon as you set “Overclock Mode” to Manual. It is a real pity because Gigabyte mainboards - against which we are comparing ASRock’s solution today – allow pushing the CPU frequency up to impressive 3.8GHz with the help of this “smart” overclocking alone. However, overclocking results on our ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard would have been lower anyway. Gigabyte mainboards had a special “Load-Line Calibration” option that prevented the CPU Vcore from dropping under heavy load thus ensuring that the processor core voltage would remain at its nominal value and that the CPU would remain stable during overclocking. There is no option like that in the BIOS of ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard.
Well, we will have to consider overclocking as means of increasing the performance at any price, disregarding the power consumption, heat dissipation and noise. But first let’s find out the maximum base frequency at which ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard remains stable with the multiplier lowered to its minimal value of x12.
215MHz is an excellent result! Of course, the CPU is not overclocked in this case, its frequency is even a little lower than the nominal. But most importantly, the board allows it to work at this high base frequency without losing stability. This margin is more than enough to successfully overclock our CPU sample to its absolute maximum. Theoretically. During our practical experiments we could get our system to run stably only at 3.7GHz.
This is a pretty low result, considering that Gigabyte mainboards can overclock the same exact CPU to 3.95GHz with increased Vcore. However, we can improve it a little bit with the help of the Turbo Boost technology working “correctly” on ASRock X58 SuperComputer board. The board failed the stability test with the CPU overclocked to 3.8GHz. However, at that point it loaded the CPU to its maximum with 8 threads in Prime95 utility. If the test application created no more than four threads, the system passed all tests at 3.8GHz frequency.
However, there is a drawback as well in using Turbo Boost technology for CPU overclocking on ASRock X58 SuperComputer. When the utility loads the CPU with five threads or more, the processor clock frequency drops to 3.62GHGz.
As a result, the user can select the most optimal CPU overclocking mode for his needs. If the system is mostly used by well paralleled applications, such as video or sound processing, or distributed computing, then it is most effective to overclock the CPU to 3.7GHz and have Turbo Boost disabled. If there are no multi-threaded applications involved, , it will make more sense to keep this technology up and running and overclock the CPU to 3.8/3.62GHz depending on the load.
However, there is one more option available. You can disable SMT technology that allows each CPU core to process two computational threads at a time. In this case multi-threaded performance drops dramatically, because the CPU can only process four computational threads at a time instead of eight. However, you will be able to increase the resulting clock speed to 3.9GHz, which will definitely pay back in most contemporary applications that would normally create two computational threads at the most.
However, ASRock X58 SuperComputer still falls behind Gigabyte here, because in these conditions we managed to overclock our processor on Gigabyte mainboards to 4.1GHz. Besides, you can get the memory to work at high frequencies on Gigabyte mainboards, which on ASRock X58 SuperComputer you have to use aggressively low timings to make up for the low memory frequency. The results of this comparison are quite logical and they are not in ASRock’s favor. However, I am still very positive about the mere possibility of CPU overclocking on ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard, even despite a few issues in the implementation of this procedure.
The menu of the CD disk bundled with ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard by default offers to install all necessary drivers:
There are a few manuals on this disk: user manual, a manual on RAID array creation, a manual on connecting up to 8 monitors, and Intel Matrix Storage Manager manual. You can also get the current system status update here:
…and check out the list of available software utilities and their application:
As for us, we are primarily interested in the utilities for this specific mainboard. We are going to skip the McAfee VirusScan this time and focus on ASRock’s brand name tools:
The first utility in this list is ASRock OC Tuner. The moment you launch this tool for the first time it becomes evident that it has been designed following the old traditions: bulky sophisticated interface with all the useful info in tiny font in a tiny window.
The next section is called “Hardware Monitor”.
The next one is “Over Clocking” where you can change the base frequency, PCI Express bus frequency and even increase the CPU clock frequency multiplier to 22!
The last section allows adjusting the voltages. However, the processor Vcore seems to be suspiciously low:
Overall, ASRock OC Tuner utility seems to be one of those tools that you install and remove almost immediately, once you’ve checked out its functionality.
The next brand name utility from ASRock is called ASRock IES (Intelligent Energy Saver).
You already know that you can enable from the BIOS the mainboard’s power-saving technologies, such as the one cutting down the number of active CPU voltage regulator phases in idle mode. It is a very smart solution, although you need to disable this feature during overclocking, unlike MSI mainboards that also have the same thing. However, the BIOS offers nothing for configuring of this technology that is why I expected to find some in the ASRock IES program. It turned out that this utility only serves to indicate the current number of active phases in the processor voltage regulator circuitry, to keep track of time, to calculate the amount of saved power, i.e. it is not very useful.
Finally, the last utility in this list is called ASRock Instant Boot. The last but not the least, according to ASRock. For example, all ASRock web-sites have the following header: “Boot up to Windows in 4 seconds!” The utility has very simple looks. In fact, it is merely a menu where you can either activate Instant Boot mode or disable it.
There are two possible settings: Fast Mode that enables 4-second booting and Regular Mode, in which the system will take a little longer to boot, but it will still be very quickly. In the former case all the data is stored in the system RAM that is why everything boots so quickly. However, the system must receive power. The second mode implies that the data is stored on the hard drive, but in this case the computer can be unplugged from the power source.
As you can easily understand, ASRock Instant Boot uses very familiar Windows power-saving technologies, such as Sleep and Hibernation. Although there are still a few differences. What happens when the user picks one of these two modes? The current system status is saved in the RAM or on the system HDD, system shuts down, but returns back to operational very quickly after turning on.
With ASRock Instant Boot things are a little bit different. The user shuts down the system, but instead of shutting down the system reboots, saves the status in the memory or on hard drive depending on the mode, and then immediately shuts down. As a result, it comes back to life very quickly after turning on.
Formally, this approach takes even a little more time, but the plan is crystal clear and smart. We shut down the system and leave, and it doesn’t really matter how much time it will take for the system to shut down. When we turn it back on, we have a goal, we are ready to get to work, but instead we sit and wait for the operating system to finally load. With ASRock Instant Boot we don’t take into account that it took the system longer to shut down. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is the fact that we get the system up and running in no time.
Of course, this approach does have its drawbacks and restrictions. It will not work for the computers with multiple users, each with his or her own profile requiring a login and password entry. When the system goes into sleep or hibernation mode, we get the system back up the way we left it – with all the running applications. ASRock Instant Boot gives us a clean OS. However, there is an advantage to that: we don’t drag all the “junk” info with us. All in all, I am sure there will be users who will benefit a lot from ASRock Instant Boot. And we would like to add a few extra points to ASRock’s total score for creativity.
If we recall everything we said in this review, you may get the wrong impression of the ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. We did point out a few design issues, problems during work in nominal mode and during overclocking, several flaws in the mainboard BIOS. However, ASRock deserves the most positive feedback for the mere release of this very board. Yes, it inferior to Gigabyte solutions on the same chipset from several standpoints, but let me remind you that it took Gigabyte quite some time before we started to like their mainboards. For a considerable while “Gigabyte mainboard” has a negative connotation and only over the past few years things started to improve, and now Gigabyte mainboards are ones of the best in the entire computer industry.
I think ASRock’s problem is that they wanted to get all at once. It is not a coincidence that they called their new mainboard a “SuperComputer”. The developers wanted to make sure that you can easily install up to four graphics cards, enable power-saving right from the BIOS, save settings profiles, easily overclock the CPU or system memory to the desired frequency… These are very natural and good goals, but it is not easy to do everything correctly on the first attempt from scratch. In this situation some problems are simply inevitable. I think it would have been much better if the company hadn’t tried to catch up with and outrun all competitors at once, but had taken full advantage of its unique competitive features.
What do we know ASRock mainboards for in the first place? Unique technical solutions and low price. What will we remember ASRock X58 SuperComputer for? Well, I believe it will be the unusual “Powered eSATAII/USB” connector and that’s about it. In my opinion, they had to give up four PCI Express x16 slots and leave only two of them, because most users will still use only one anyway. Making the layout a little simpler this way could help lower the price of this board. They had to focus on flawless operation in nominal mode and on basic CPU overclocking functionality and only then try to simplify, automate and optimize these processes. What we have at this point is a pretty expensive mainboard with a lot of features, some of which do not work properly or do not work at all.
But nevertheless, despite all the issues we pointed out, I really liked ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard. It works, it can even overclock CPUs, it exists, unlike mainboards from Abit, Chaintech or EPoX. It will be really sad if we will be stuck only with Asus and Gigabyte mainboards without any freedom of choice. That is why I sincerely hope that ASRock Company will continue working on the new mainboards, will take into account the issues we pointed out and next time they will make a perfect mainboard that will proudly bear the “SuperComputer” title.
ASRock X58 SuperComputer mainboard is currently available on Newegg for $294.99.