ASRock was founded in 2002 and in the last 12 years has risen to becoming the third largest motherboard manufacturer in the world. Cost effectiveness compared to its competitors is one of the primary reasons for this. ASRock has established a reputation for being relatively reliable and certainly inexpensive on the whole.

If you’re a long time reader of HardOCP then you probably know we are not huge fans of ASRock as a brand. We have had more than a few mixed experiences with ASRock products that we have purchased in etail thus far. Our problems with ASRock tend to be centered around quality and quality control, or lack thereof. Not all of its models are necessarily of poor quality. In fact we’ve even taken pictures of ASRock PCBs with more waves in these than your average beach at high tide. Still some models like the X79 Extreme4 stand out as examples of excellence while models like the Z68 Gen3 were polar opposites of that.