ASRock Transformer - More Than Meets The Eye?

[Tharic-Nar]

Not one to shy away from combining the best of both worlds, ASRock is at it again striking a blow for budget conscious users everywhere! Some of you may remember its earlier LGA775 offerings which combined AGP and PCI-E slots, along with the ability to use DDR2 or DDR3 memory on the same motherboard. These two solutions gave consumers the ability to upgrade specific components individually rather than put up a large amount of money for a complete system change. This time around, it has taken Intel's latest and greatest P67 chipset and given it LGA1156 support, rather than the native 1155.

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[Optix]

I was floating around checking out videos and I came across one that had an interview with a marketing rep from ASRock who said that this board only support Windows 7 due to the hoops they had to jump through in order to support the previous generation of processors so if you're looking at this board as an upgrade, please keep it in mind.

 

[Kougar]

That is crazy! Keep the same CPU, but upgrade the motherboard? At first it seems like a novel idea, but then I'm not as sure...

Unlike their AGP/PCIe or DDR2/DDR3 boards which had both connections on the same board, this only has the LGA1156 socket, which unless I am mistaken doesn't work with LGA1155 processors. So it doesn't provide any additional flexibility for future upgrades. And much of the functionality can be obtained by buying a refreshed P55 motherboard, which would have USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s built in.

That said, I still love the idea. It's great when motherboard manufacturers can find new ways innovate and think outside the box.

 

[Rob Williams]

That is crazy! Keep the same CPU, but upgrade the motherboard? At first it seems like a novel idea, but then I'm not as sure...

It sounds a little bizarre to me. It'd be kind of like upgrading a car by replacing the entire chassis but leaving the engine in-tact. Well, in some cases that at least makes sense, but I'm not sure about a motherboard.

When you upgrade to a better CPU, the differences can be huge. Upgrading to a newer motherboard chipset improves what, exactly? The CPU speed remains the same... you just gain some minor functionality with the chipset that you might not even use.

Either way, it's a very cool idea and it's nice to see a company like ASRock doing interesting things like this.

 

[Optix]

The only real improvement with this would be storage since the extra PCI-E lanes are jacked wide open. Chip performance stays the same really with likely no real world performance gain.