full text can be found @

http://www.asrock.com/news/K8_combo-Z.htm

Hmm yes, two sockets on a single board... that's a nice feature. Asrock makes quite nice boards nowadays. They aren't tbe best performing on earth, but they are equipped with lots of features and they are priced reasonably. And the best of all: Asrock is a daughter of Asus, so the quality is still ok. The only con of this board is the somewhat less performing SiS chipset.

BTW... Asrock has a similar board for the P4 (s468 or s775).

Have to say I have never seen a board with two different sockets before.

i don't like AS(S)Rock(s)...

I believe the concept is kind of new... I guess they do this to sell boards that can be used for multiple years with different CPUs. Both s775 and s939 will be the future, but for now s754 and s468 are still mainstream. Good thinking!

Very good thinking so long as it doesn't affect performance. One of the Intel thoughts on the new 775 chipset was to get rid of all of the old slow things. Parallel, PS2 and so on.

If it works it's something to look out for.

It does in some way, as they use cheap chipsets and those don't perform as excellent as the more expensive ones.

They really can't do that... there are just too many people (especially in the business world) that make use of these somewhat ancient techniques. Abit tried this with their MAXX mainboards but that never was a succes, so they put some old connectors back on.

Hmmm personally I'd never buy such a board, but indeed, for those who don't need top performance, but do need an upgrade after 3 year or so, this MIGHT be a good investment. We all know that it's not only the socket that has to fit of course.

ASRock boards don't have good performace at all...
They are just cheap...

Pity really I wouldn't mind getting rid of my old stuff. Would give me an excuse for upgrading everything.


Same for me. I know what I want and in three years(probably less ) I will want something new.


Had a bad experience with these boards then?

price isnt everything , i prefer spend a bit more and buy an Asus, Tyan , Gigabyte ...
and agp is dead , wait for pci-X.

My Linux server (fileserver, mailserver, ftp server, xserver etc) has been running for over a year now and it's equipped with an Asrock K7 board (with 512MB of cheapass memory and an Athlon 1800+). No problems there... the performance can't be compared to modern systems anymore, but since the board only costed about €35 (18 months ago) I think the price/performance ratio is excellent!

Reminds me of an old ECS board we used to use in our shop. It had a "slot 1" and a "socket 370" on it. It was during the transitional phase between the two and was an excellent choice as we could configure systems with one board but offer any available pentium or celeron.
You tend to see this type of thing during the transitional phases. I also have a board with "dimm" and "simm" memory sockets.

yes, some of my friends have had asrock boards - not one of them would do it again...
one was defective after half a year (usb didn't work anymore from one second to another), others claim about stability of their system...
and compared in a system-benchmark you can see big differences in performance to e.g. ABIT or ASUS or GIGABYTE boards...

in my eyes, these cheap boards are good for low-cost systems, but it is as always:
they have many abilities, but cannot handle one of those really good as more expensive boards...