ASRock is a company that was a less expensive alternative to their parent company Asus. Over the last 7 years ASRock has designed motherboards that have innovative and unique features like a board with AGP/PCI Express slots on the same board, an adapter for Socket AM2 CPUs on a Socket 939 board and other features that other motherboard manufacturers won't touch.
AMD launched their AM3 CPU platform a couple of months ago. The Socket AM3 replaces the Socket AM2+ CPUs that have been around over a year. One good thing about the new CPU Socket is that it can be used on existing AM2+ motherboards, meaning that the cost of owning the new platform is much less than if the memory, the motherboard, and the CPU need to be changed. Many existing AM2+ motherboards can use the AM3 CPU with a BIOS update. This leads to interesting combinations of motherboards like today's A780GMH/128M motherboard on the test bench.
