Quote from: El Jacko

Quote from: WalrusbonzoMaybe things are different now, but I thought ASRock boards were supposed to be poor cheap alternatives to quality ones from the likes of ASUS?

ASRock is owned by Asus. Thats why asus dont make any bargain basement boards.

Exactly, the bargain basement tat is ASRock.

I didnt upgrade without reason. I did so because of the worse than lousy BIOS on the Asus PK5C board, which was causing repeated dropout errors with the SATA2 hotswap drivers.

Truth is the Asus BIOS was dreadful, not just slightly flawed, and maybe it was due to the fact it was a cheap and nasty board  

I chose this board because its had some above average reviews, and because it had just the right balance of slots and ports which suit my needs and would leave me some room to upgrade too, particularly at the graphics level should I later wish to do so.

Since last posting I have attempted to load Win XP32bit Pro, and add the audio drivers from SP1 level.

I got further in Device Manager than under 64bit, but still couldnt so much as get a sparrows fart out of the speakers.

Therefore Im growing ever more convinced that this audio hardware in simply uncompatible with XP full stop, and that it only works under Vista  

Both ASRocks website, and the CD-ROM drivers, state this board will work under all favours of XP - however I believe those claims to be theoretical and untested (unless the tech who did so was a  deaf old git!)

Just as un update.....................

Rang Tekheads on Monday, discussed the problem. Decided to give the board the benefit of the doubt (and bought Vista Business OEM from Tekheads) to make sure that nothing was left to chance about this being a driver issue under XP x86/64.

No dice. Drivers loaded OK under Vista, but same no audio output persisted.

The review at the url below suggests the chipset on this board runs very cool, in fact they say below 40c which is very low indeed. However the Northbridge heatsink on the board I received reaches 75c at idle and jumps to over 85c at desktop/internet in light use - and those arent estimates, its what my multimeter probes reads.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/8082-asrock-x48turbotwins-wifi-motherboard-review.html

Have requested an exchange board, I think I got the one made the morning after a real bender of a weekend

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By the way, how does my Vista ranking measure up?  :?



Its running a Quad Core Q9300, 4Gb of OCZ DDR3 Ram (CPU & RAM 1,333Mhz)
and a modest HD3470 Sapphire PCI-e card, plus a couple of SATA-II Barracudas