ASRock A55 Pro3

Zitat:   ASRock´s A55 Pro3 was our first system to utilize AMD´s Llano line of APUs, and it´s been quite an experience. To touch briefly on the processor itself, it was quite a surprisingly animal to say the least. The performance it offered, specifically it´s graphics power, was not something we expected a whole lot from. However, on the contrary the HD 6550D packs a fair bit of punch and was able to handle quite a bit. It´s ability to play a fast paced game like Need for Speed: SHIFT, at 1680x1050 resolution and with 4x AntiAliasing, surely wasn´t what we thought it to be capable of. The A55 Pro3 is also a wolf in sheep´s clothing. It comes across as being your typical budget-based motherboard, ones that seem to talk big with features, but never quite pull off what they offer. Again we are greeted by an item that delivered, and then some! One might think that claim of DDR3-2400 support to be rather far fetched and yet here it is, managing 2300MHz just fine, which seems mostly limited by our modules. Heck, even that 5500 Mark Vantage score is pretty much dead on, with our overclock just falling a few points shy of it. Indeed, the A55 Pro3 does seem to get a lot of things right, but even looking at it from a non-enthusiast point of view it still could use a bit of polishing. The UEFI BIOS has been around for awhile now, with it becoming rather mainstream at about the beginning 2011. ASRock have a whole slew of models of motherboards under their belt which utilize this, yet still there are problems with the mouse support. It wasn´t until recently with BIOS release 1.20 that my Razer Diamondback actually functions correctly, which even then the menu highlighting doesn´t track properly at all and causes unwanted screen scrolling at times. To be honest I still don´t use the mouse but am just glad to finally have a new interface to deal with. I only mark this against the board because a lot of the people you know, may build a system for and perhaps even yourself, simply might be left with a sour taste in your mouth. Which may not be totally justified either given the fact this motherboard is quite the buy. Potential improvements aside, I think ASRock hammered out a pretty good motherboard with the A55 Pro3. It offers the end user some room to grow, or even room to experiment with overclocking by proving to be quite capable should you so desire. Currently the board can be had for as little as $75, providing quite a lot for the price. The money saved could easily be the difference in upgrading to a higher end APU or the difference in having 8GB of DDR3 instead of 4GB.