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[–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

They used to make zanier products (the stuff with ULI chipsets and CPU upgrade slots) back in the 2000s when they were a lowend brand competing with ECS. The feature set between boards is less diverse these days.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the "same" mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.

    The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.

    But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of "instant boot mini-Linux environments", and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)

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