A basic barebones motherboard with a price to match, ASROCK's P4VT8 Pentium 4 motherboard may not be the most feature packed mobo around, but what it lacks in integrated components, it more than makes up for with its bargain basement price tag and practical applications.
For a simple motherboard, it contains some impressive options, including two Serial ATA drive headers, five PCI slots, 10/100 Ethernet, RAID, a half dozen rear-mounted USB 2.0 ports and three DDR400 supportive RAM slots. Absolutely unheard of in a board under $100.
Included in the package is a pair of SATA cables, SATA power adaptor, FDD and IDE cables for floppy and parallel drive connectivity. ASROCK has supplied everything you'll need to get up and running straight out of the box.
The small form factor of the board makes it suitable for smaller formed housings and perfect as an entertainment PC with its integrated 5.1 audio and 8x AGP slot with room for tuner expansion care of the numerous PCI slots.
Granted this board won't be for the power users, our benchmarking results showed the board's weakness with an overall SYSmark 2002 score of 194 using our Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor, half a gigabyte of PC3200 DDR RAM and GeForce4 Ti4600 graphics.
The CMOS reset is located rather awkwardly between the fourth and fifth PCI slots, making for a difficult reset if you have a device in the fourth slot, not a big issue, but enough to cause undue anguish if you need to reset while overclocking.
Also included with the motherboard is an easy soft overclocking utility and DIY video outline identification of parts and installation of the motherboard. Not a lot of use to the first-timer lacking another machine to play it back. Fortunately the paper manual includes instructions for jumper set up, plugging drives and installing RAM modules. Poor DIMM placement results in the inability to properly open the first and second clip release because of the AGP slot, making for difficult hardware removal.
ASROCK have found the sweet spot in the market in consumers looking to build or update their own computers without breaking the bank. This mobo provides all the functions of much more expensive boards, whilst still maintaining excellent value. A real steal for a motherboard like this, we hope this is a future trend. Well performing cheap electronics.