OCWORKBENCH EXCL REVIEW: ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2

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ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2
ASRock's ALiveXfire-eSATA2 is the first AM2 board from ASRock that uses ATi chipset. ASRock never fail to shock us by their innovation. Never did I expect them to pair up an older RD480 with the newest SB600 from ATi for CrossFire solution!. On the ALiveXFire-eSATA2, the ATi RD480+SB600 pair is used to support dual PCIe x8 for CrossFire or single PCIe x16.

This board supports Dual 8x PCIe for CrossFire, DC-DDR2-533/667/800, GbE, 4 SATA II with 2 can be paired up for eSATA connection. It has HDMI_SPDIF header to provide audio thru the HDMI VGA card. It also has 7.1 HD audio and attained the Windows Vista Premium Hardware Ready and can run Windows MCE. It is also AMD ALive! Ready!

With AMD+ATI merger, it would mean that AMD will pay more emphasis to give more support to the ATi chipsets. ASRock can foresee the market paradigm shifting towards ATi and come out with this latest board ALiveXFire-eSATA2.
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READ REVIEW http://www.ocworkbench.com/2006/asro...-eSATA2/g1.htm

[WetWilly]

Great review as always, and of course you're first with the exclusive. Some minor things I noticed:

1) The Discuss in Forum link on pages 4 & 5 (Gallery) and page 8 (Benchmarks) takes you to the archived, old forum;

2) The Discuss link on page 8 (Benchmarks) takes you to the ECS forum, not the ASRock forum;

3) There's no sticky ALiveXFire-eSATA2 Review thread on the ASRock forum yet.

Edit: I just noticed that last month was my 5-year anniversary for registering here! That doesn't count the time I lurked before registering. Time flies when you're having fun

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Thanks. Have fun lurking more. There are some upcoming contests ;)

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Is this board on sale in other places?

[WetWilly]

It's available at Newegg for $73. I'm assuming it's a fairly recent addition because there are no customer reviews yet.

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I would say it is one of the best cost/performance board by ASRock that features CrossFire

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Till today, no one bought this board and using it/