Asrock Xfire 770

[W1nTry]

Something unusual has come: http://my.ocworkbench.com/2008/asrock/A770CrossFire/g1.htm

An AMD 770 chipset mobo with... Crossfire??? and cheap??? and highly overclockable?? wow...

[Arcmanov]

That mobo design sucks serious ass.  The 24-pin power header (and the 8-pin CPU header ) could not be in a more worse place.
Behind the CPU socket?  Talk about airflow disruption.

Asrock needs to come again with that...

[W1nTry]

That's only if pulling air out the back of the chassis is an issue, which is inherently linked to the orientation of the HSF. As with mine the Xigmatek points upwards towards the 120m far on my OCZ PSU. Which isn't all that bad. Alternatively there are cases with the PSU at the bottom and venting at the top again making this orientation fine. Last I checked Hot air has the tendancy to rise, so with a setup that allows for easy ventilation out the top, it DOESN'T suck.

[Arcmanov]

Wow..so I guess Asus and Gigabyte don't know what they're doing when they place all these connectors AROUND THE BOARD EDGES.

There's lots of reasons why those two manus are at the top of the heap when it comes to motherboard manufacturing.
Good layout is a significant one.

[Spazosaurus]

The power connectors arent exactly placed in the ideal location but it should be easy enough to get them out of the way to make for some decent exhaust-out-the-back action and the CPU socket itself is far enough to the right that it allows ample room for you large heatsink to be installed. Oh yeah...that nb heatsink makes the only pci-e x1 slot pretty useless there with anything other than the shortest expansion cards...pretty dumb.

Now, if only they would make an intel version of this board with a p41/45 chipset, with all the right features and at the right price, i'll hit that.

[W1nTry]

There also a reason Asrock is rock bottom cheap :p yall seem to be forgetting that to make the product cheap means less layers, less engineer, R&D, etc. So the fact that they managed to get Xfire to a 770 mobo at a really low cost is the bottom line. You can argue all about who's on top and where power is located at the end of the day it was never meant to compete with Asus of Gigabyte.