CeBIT 2009 3-8 March, Hannover (Germany), day 3

Page 10 - ASRock: Motherboards, X58 SuperComputer with NVIDIA Tesla

ASRock are probably amongst the most famous budget oriented motherboard manufacturers in Bulgaria and have well established name around the world. Ever since ASRock entered at the market they proved to be quite an innovative company, and had made a lot of motherboards that held top positions in the overclock charts through the years, despite their very balanced (and most often - low) price. ASRock offer both motherboards based on cheap mainstream chipsets and ones based on higher class chipsets such as X58 for Core i7. At the expo the AsRock stand was enormous, yet still managed have on display many extremely interesting products, including a NVIDIA TESLA configuration and for special guests (like us :)) they had something special too.

ASRock X58 SuperComputer with NVIDIA Tesla

ASRock demonstrated an impressive system with their ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard. This is no ordinary X58 motherboard, it is (for the time being) the only motherboard in the world allowing you to use NVIDIA Tesla at home. Unlike supercomputers in the past, that tend to occupy vast amount of space, consume huge quantities of power and required extensive maintenance, ASRock Supercomputer is more affordable solution for scientists and professionals that need large amounts of computing power. ASRock X58 SuperComputer has four two directional PCI-E 16x slots (unlike all other X58 motherboards that has up to 3) and at the expo was running in three of them a NVIDIA Tesla C1060 card along with a single NVIDIA Quadro in the additional fourth slot. Each of the cards allows up to 1 teraflop of computing power, as a result of which the computation power of the ASRock machine equals that of 250 professional PC's! The marketing representative of ASRock, that showed us around their stand, showed us that the programed task that usually takes a week to compute is done with this machine for about 10 minutes. The motherboard still has a normal price for a X58 motherboard and is freely available for end users interested in only gaming SLI and CrossFire configuration. And if that's not astonishing we know not what is, ASRock have the full right to be proud of their achievement.

Another astonishing ASRock achievement we saw was at the back of the stand in the area off limits for the regular visitors of CeBIT. Namely, the ASRock engineers have found a way to successfully an stable run AMD CrossFire on a N7AD-SLI motherboard, based on the NVIDIA 740i SLI chipset. Even more, this is not an "empty" achievement, because we were assured that the when the new BIOS is completely tested it will be released to the public as an optional download at the ASRock website, and not for this motherboard alone either. It will probably support few other models based on NVIDIA chipset. This way users will get to choose what video card configurations they want in their systems, something possible for now only with expensive X58 motherboards for Core i7.

Intel Atom is gathering popularity and lots of brands (following in ASUS and MSI footsteps) are nowadays releasing compact and ultra economical computers for music, internet and office applications, the so called netbooks - small and inexpensive computers. ASRock are riding the wave with the release of their own NetTop S330 and few small laptops :)

You've must have noticed already our elevated mood towards ASRock, that's only natural, they did impressed us greatly after all. Most budget oriented companies do exactly that - decent, though often ragged products impressing with nothing else, save their price. While ASRock did indeed show things that cannot be seen even at the stands of major companies! We salute the innovations and effort made by their developers and hope to be able to soon start reviewing their products, which are easily obtained in Bulgaria, for the reviews will be most useful for you - our readers.