Product Listing

ASRock AM2V890-VSTA (VIA K8T890 CF)

By Zachary Chan - 4 Jul 2006

Conclusion

Conclusion

ASRock is well known to veer away from new and high-end chipsets for their motherboard products, opting instead to deliver capable entry-level solutions on older or existing core logic solutions without sacrificing too much on the performance front or even features. This has proven to be quite a successful combination and we've had the opportunity to test a few such boards from ASRock like the 939Dual-SATA2 and 775XFire-eSATA2. Sadly, the AM2V890-VSTA falls off the mark.

When ASRock announced a line of motherboards supporting Socket AM2 based on a variety of chipsets from NVIDIA and ULi to VIA, the AM2V890-VSTA seemed to be the most cost-effective motherboard to go for. Its basic features are perfect for the home user with no real need for performance computing out of the casual web-surfing or desktop publishing. Because of this, we cannot really complain about the 'slow' SATA 1.5Gbps support or 10/100Mbps Ethernet and since AMD is moving their entire line-up to AM2, it becomes justifiable for a low-cost motherboard such as the AM2V890-VSTA.

In fact, the board does offer up some interesting multimedia capabilities with its top end Realtek ALC888 HD Audio CODEC (which we suspect is an incentive for having the Vista Premium Ready logo) and HDMI S/PDIF connector.

However, the AM2V890-VSTA suffers from poor implementation where its major problems are all memory related. Firstly, the board is incredibly picky about memory modules used with it and incompatible RAM can cause problems ranging from being unable to POST to application instability. From our tests, the board also has a low tolerance level for memory tweaking, and changing RAM timings out of SPD can cause all the stability problems to re-surface.

Budget for budget's sake. The AM2V890-VSTA is really a decent entry-level board, but memory problems are aplenty.

Properly setup, the board performs well enough to hold its own against the high-end ECS KA3 MVP, but at the moment, that is exactly the hardest part to do. Seeing that the board targets the entry-level market, the average consumer may not have the technical knowledge to troubleshoot memory and BIOS related problems or have no patience in doing so. Until ASRock is able to iron out the compatibility, stability and performance issues with the board, it is hard to wholeheartedly recommend the AM2V890-VSTA. If you're looking for a budget motherboard to jump on the Socket AM2 bandwagon, there are better alternatives out there, even from ASRock themselves.

ASRock has since released a new BIOS (P1.20) that seems to resolve most compatibility problems with different types of RAM modules. However, the board is still very fickle with memory tweaking and still exhibits POST issues with non-SPD timing and frequencies.

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