This is my first mainboard from ASRock.
I'm usually an ASUS mainboard customer ever since Micron stopped selling their boards - which is a LOOOONG time ago. I've used Gigabyte occasionally, but mostly ASUS.
Their support isn't the best, but you don't usually need it. Its LEDs tell you what's wrong within seconds / minutes.
Enter ASRock: First thing, the manual is annoying. There's no single-page diagram of the mainboard to discern all the headers. They are spread piecemeal over many different pages.
And the print is overly small. Like they want to save paper. There is also zero information on pre-POST diagnostics.
The 3 LED's under the PCIe slot blink green twice, then switch to slowly blinking red indefinitely.
Amazingly, the entire manual lacks any information on what the LED's might be trying to tell you.
Next thing, ASRock's support page insists on entering data you don't have if the board doesn't make it to POST.
Like you've just entered the Twilight Zone.
Then I stumbled over the morsel, that I can upgrade the BIOS without even installing a CPU - well great, but shouldn't a board I bought on August 28th 2018 support an Intel i7-8700 out of the box anyway? Seems unlikely I'd need that. Manufacturing Date isn't given, at least not in plain language. Probably encoded in the serial number or whatever other perverse obfuscation hardware manufacturers get up to.
Google also found a page on "Dr. Debug"
There's various potentially useful codes and explanations, but the codes are alphanumeric, so how / where do you discern these codes prior to POST? Not without some secret sauce that ASRock doesn't talk about.
Here's hoping for an avid ASRock system builder who knows how you deal with pre-POST issues with an ASRock board, that doesn't amount to wild guessing.
I should have known to buy something else, when I spotted the word "FATAL1TY"... my bad.
I'm usually an ASUS mainboard customer ever since Micron stopped selling their boards - which is a LOOOONG time ago. I've used Gigabyte occasionally, but mostly ASUS.
Their support isn't the best, but you don't usually need it. Its LEDs tell you what's wrong within seconds / minutes.
Enter ASRock: First thing, the manual is annoying. There's no single-page diagram of the mainboard to discern all the headers. They are spread piecemeal over many different pages.
And the print is overly small. Like they want to save paper. There is also zero information on pre-POST diagnostics.
The 3 LED's under the PCIe slot blink green twice, then switch to slowly blinking red indefinitely.
Amazingly, the entire manual lacks any information on what the LED's might be trying to tell you.
Next thing, ASRock's support page insists on entering data you don't have if the board doesn't make it to POST.
Like you've just entered the Twilight Zone.
Then I stumbled over the morsel, that I can upgrade the BIOS without even installing a CPU - well great, but shouldn't a board I bought on August 28th 2018 support an Intel i7-8700 out of the box anyway? Seems unlikely I'd need that. Manufacturing Date isn't given, at least not in plain language. Probably encoded in the serial number or whatever other perverse obfuscation hardware manufacturers get up to.
Google also found a page on "Dr. Debug"
There's various potentially useful codes and explanations, but the codes are alphanumeric, so how / where do you discern these codes prior to POST? Not without some secret sauce that ASRock doesn't talk about.
Here's hoping for an avid ASRock system builder who knows how you deal with pre-POST issues with an ASRock board, that doesn't amount to wild guessing.
I should have known to buy something else, when I spotted the word "FATAL1TY"... my bad.
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