ALiveXFire-eSATA2 is ASRock's first AM2 board based on the ATi chipset. Although it uses the older RD480 chipset, it is paired with the latest South bridge, the SB600. Just like the other AM2 boards reviewed before, this board supports dual channel DDRII-800/667/533 with 4 DIMM slots with a max capacity of 8GB. This mainboard also boost a new patented technology to boost memory performance up to 12.5%. The board also supports 4 SATA II 3.0Gb/s supporting RAID 0,1, JBOD, NCQ and hot plug functions. There is PCIe based GbE, a 7.1 ch VISTA premium level HD Audio using the ALC888 audio codec. The board is also AMD Live! Ready and the board is Windows^® Vista™ Permium Logo Hardware Ready. It also has eSATA2 ports for external connection to SATA HDD.

In terms of performance, this board is pretty good in memory performance although it is clocked at almost half a megahertz lower than most of the boards in comparison. Although we didn't enable the AM2 boost feature, a check on it shows that it boost the CPU CLK to 203MHz to compensate the drop in memory performance due to AM2's spec of multiplier ratio and bandwidth. As it is using the SB600, we tested the disk performance and USB performance. We are quite pleased with the high USB performance with our external USB HDD test. In fact, it exceeded our expectations.

We also ran the board in a Dual 8x PCIe configuration and tested CrossFire with Catalyst 6.9. The results are comparable to the ATi Xpress 3200 (RD580+SB600) boards. To use CrossFire, you have to remove the PCIe Switch card. It would be good if it can auto sense to switch between DUal PCIex8 or single PCIe x16.

In terms of overclocking, the board has the basic options like voltage for dimm, NB and cpu, cpu freq range of up to 400MHz and a up to 10x multiplier option. There are options to lock PCI and PCIe too. For overclocking options, please see Gallery for BIOS options. In our overclocking test, we set the HT multiplier to 4x (800MHz) and set the CPU multiplier to 10x, CPU Vcore to 1.4v and other voltages to the max. We were only able to push the CPU CLK up to 250x10 with  POST. We tried to find the highest HTT by lowering the HT Multiplier to 600MHZ (3x) and running at ASync DDR2-400, it just couldn't go beyond 250MHz x multiplier. Perhaps a new BIOS will solve this issue.

As for packaging, ASRock is quite generous with the ALiveXFire-eSATA2, the package comes with 4 SATA II cables which you can use for your eSATA connections to the backplane. A USB bracket and HDMI_SPDIF cable is also provided.

Overall, the board works well with no issues at all. Both chipsets are passively cooled making it suitable for a quiet system. The feature set is very complete but lack a 1394. It suits well for a gaming machine if you intend to use the CrossFire feature supported by the chipset. This is also one of the cheapest AM2 CrossFire board in the market right now!

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Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• Hot Plug SATA
• SATA II RAID
• 7.1 HD audio
• VISTA Premium Hardware Ready
• ALive! Ready

Cons

• 1394
• PCIe switch card

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.