Introduction

A number of new AM2 based motherboards have hit the scenes since the release of AMD's new socket. It has taken a while, but we are finally seeing some very good boards hit the market now. ASRock themselves have come out with a number of variations of the AM2 boards, this one is based on the old NF6100 (Northbridge) with 410 (Southbridge) chipset. The ALiveNF4G-DVI supports all the basics of AM2, Dual Channel DDR2-800/667/533 with 4 DIMM slots which comes to a max capacity of 8GB. It also comes with 1 PCIe x16, 1 PCIex1 and 2 basic PCI.

The main difference here is that the board ships with the integrated NV44 Graphics DX 9.0 with support for Pixel Shader 3.0, the board also has support for NVIDIA PureVideo ready for accelerating video clips. Finally it has support for 2 SATA II 3.0GB/s which supports Raid 0, 1, JBOD, NCQ and hot plugging features. There is full fast Ethernet and 7.1 Vista Premium level HD Audio thanks to the ALC888 Audio Codec. This means that the board is Windows Vista Premium Certified, something we will be testing full once Vista has gone gold.

System Setup

The board comes with 2 PCI, 1 PCIex1 and 1 PCIex16 slot for external VGA card. On the top left you would see audio codec ALC888, Realtek Fast Ethernet RTL8201 chip. At the bottom left, you have the 2 SATA II ports and 2 IDE channel supported by the MCP410 chipset. On its left are the USB connectors. On the right hand side are the 4 DIMM slots supporting up to a total of 8GB of memory using DDR2-533/667/800. The back panel consists of PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse, VGA, DVI, 1 LPT, 1 VGA, 2 USB ports, Fast Ethernet and 7.1 channel audio ports.

Benchmarks & Information

CLKTest

SiSoft Sandra Memory Tests(Higher Is Better)

PCMark 05 (Higher Is Better)

Doom 3  - (Higher Is Better)

This test was run in 1600x1200. Of note is that if you used the integrated graphics card on the motherboard the game runs around 15 frames per seconds, not exactly perfect for gaming at this level, but reducing the resolution can bring it to an almost playable rate.

OVerall I like the ASRock board, its not too expensive and the fact that it has integrated graphics which reach the standard needed for Windows Vista Premium is a major plus point for those of you out there who do not want a fancy graphics card installed on their system, but would like their operating system to run and look as good as possible.

In overclocking terms, the board has all of the usual options such as CPU multiplier, HT Multpliers, CPU VCore and CLK changes are available, but during some of our basic testing it wasn't quite as stable as some other boards, but in saying that it was in the middle in most tests, probably because the more expensive the board, the better the heatsinks and heatpipe designs are. If you are looking for the perfect starter board for a Windows Vista Media PC, why not give the ASRock ALiveNF4G-DVI a go, its not expensive, it has decent enough graphics, some very good sound and is very stable.

Feel free to comment on the review here.