I am a Computer Hardware professional. I started working with computer technology in the early eighties. I have seen the evolution of technology starting with closed platforms like the game console era and then the move toward open platforms like the Home Computer Golden Age. In the last 5 or 10 years, I have witnessed technology changes that are slowly moving away from open hardware designs towards hardware that is locked down and can’t be modified by the user.
Lol. They are one of the few manufacturers that have made consistently solid products and components for decades. Feels like many have already jumped over to being terrible.
They used to make zanier products (the stuff with ULI chipsets and CPU upgrade slots) back in the 2000s when they were a lowend brand competing with ECS. The feature set between boards is less diverse these days.
Less diverse?
Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the “same” mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.
The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.
But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of “instant boot mini-Linux environments”, and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)
This reminds me of how I often assume a lesser known brand is a “small player” in a given industry, only to later find out that they provide parts and/or services to all of the well known brands. Kinda like Mitsubishi in the 80’s. Their parts and tech were in everything but their name was mostly associated with cheap electronics and small cars.
I think one of the computers in my basement is an ASRock board, and it’s the flimsiest board I’ve ever had. Like the USB ports are really flexible.
Chill situation