Verdict: Incredibly cheap, but it won't overclock.

Not only is ASRock expert at making super-cheap, reliable motherboards, but it's also produced several innovative designs, such as the 939Dual-SATA2, which had both an AGP and 16x PCI-E slot. This was at a time when Intel and AMD wanted to force people to upgrade to PCI-E graphics cards.

ASRock's latest motherboard, the 4Core1333-eSATA2, continues the company's tradition of rule breaking, since it supports the latest 1,333MHz FSB Core 2 CPUs, despite the fact that its core logic chipset, the Intel P31, doesn't officially support such a high FSB. In fact, according to Intel, the highest FSB that the 'mainstream' P31 chipset can support is 1,066MHz. Given how overclockable Intel's recent chipsets have been, it's hardly surprising that the P31 chipset works with 1,333MHz FSB CPUs - a feat that Gigabyte has also achieved with its GA-P31-DS3L (see p82).

The 4Core1333-eSATA2 has two full-length 16x PCI-E slots, but only the white slot has 16 lanes; the purple slot provides just one lane. Theoretically, this means that you could set up a CrossFire system but, with such a tiny amount of bandwidth available for the second card, you'd be far better off buying a single powerful graphics card. Despite its super-cheap price, the 4Core1333-eSATA2 has four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and support for Intel HD Audio, plus a generous eight USB 2 ports. There are even three PCI slots and a single 1x PCI-E slot for adding further expansion cards.

The BIOS of the 4Core1333-eSATA2 is incredibly sparse. There's no option to change the CPU multiplier, and the only voltages that can be changed are the Northbridge and VTT. These can be adjusted between Low and High settings, and precisely what effect these settings have is unknown. It came as no particular surprise that the 4Core1333-eSATA2 refused to overclock our test CPU beyond its default 333MHz FSB, and was the only motherboard in this Labs test to do so.

At its stock settings, due to its P31 heritage, the 4Core1333-eSATA2 proved to be a reasonable performer, easily managing to keep up with much more expensive motherboards. However, its lack of overclocking potential and extremely basic chipset and VRM cooling relegate it to the bottom end of this Labs test.

• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

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