Final Thoughts and Conclusion
This N7AD-SLI motherboard from ASRock certainly had potential to be what it was created to be: an affordable enthusiast board that, while not a top dog, would be a great overclocker, and a board that would allow for upgrades like SLI.
Performance on this board was decent, but we were left wondering how much better it would have been if we had not had the limitations that we had in setting our DDR timings. It is tough to know exactly how good the board would have performed under 4-4-4-12 timings.
The layout and setup of the board was great. No issues were encountered with the board at all when setting it up.
The bundle was actually decent, including everything that you needed plus some extras.
We had high hopes for the overclocking of the N7AD-SLI motherboard. We did not expect to see it out-clock the higher end boards that we have looked at, but we did expect better results. Don¡¯t get me wrong, 370FSB is not awful, but it is no where near our limits with this CPU. We were a little disappointed that lowering the multiplier did not get us any higher FSB speeds. Every board is different though, and maybe some will have better luck than we did.
The price of this board is averaging a little over $100, which would be a pretty decent price in the days of $300 motherboards! I say would be, because there are many other boards out there in this price range that are better overclockers for sure, and that have no issues with DDR timings.
Certainly there is hope that a BIOS update will help with the overclocking and DDR timings issues. If that is the case, then this board could possibly give us a totally different picture of itself.
Legit Bottom Line: ASRock does a great job of bringing great performing boards at great prices to the end user. This board is another example of that. If you are looking for an upgrade to a board that will not be used for overclocking, but could be upgraded to an SLI setup, this would be a board to consider on a list of many others.
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