14 DAY TRIAL // ASRock is a computer hardware production division from Asus that is specialized in low cost and entry level motherboards aimed at users unwilling to spend their money on high or middle level hardware. The brand is well known and liked by home and office users that are orienting themselves towards computer systems with a small footprint both energy and space wise, as most ASRock branded motherboards are coming in the mATX form factor, that allows for a smaller overall computer case.
According to the news site DigiTimes the low end Asus division recently announced the release of two computer starting kits featuring two motherboards, the 2Core1333-2.66G and the 2Core1333DVI-2.66G, that are delivered together with Intel dual-core processors supporting the latest 1333MHz frontside bus speed and that are coming factory overclocked to a frequency of 2.6GHz.
Both of the ASRock motherboards are based on the Intel 945GC A2 chipset which supports Intel processors using the LGA775 socket like Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Pentium Dual Core, Pentium 4, Celeron and Celeron D. The 945GC A2 chipset is also able to operate a large number of front side bus speeds that are currently used by different Intel processors: 1333 /1066 /800 /533MHz. The chipset also supports dual channel memory running at 533 or 667MHZ, while 4 DIMM memory slots are provided for a maximum amount of 4GB of DDR2 memory. Just like other ASRock motherboards, the 2Core1333-2.66G and the 2Core1333DVI-2.66G are coming with an integrated video solution, meaning that users who don't need high graphics performance will save some money as they will not have to buy a discrete graphics card. The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 is the graphics chip and it supports DirectX 9.0 and a maximum shared video memory of 224MB.
As both of the motherboards are packed into the smaller mATX form factor, they feature a limited number of expansion slots. There are two PCI slots for older add-on cards, a PCI Express 16x slot for a discrete video card and one PCI Express x1 slot for newer designed hardware. The two motherboards are practically identical, with a few exceptions. First, the ASRock 2Core1333DVI-2.66G comes with an add-on DVI Graphics-HDCP card for DVI output and the second difference is that it features 4 DIMM slots, while the ASRock 2Core1333-2.66G has only two.