OCW published a review on the ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2 motherboard
ASRock's ALiveXfire-eSATA2 is the first AM2 board from ASRock that uses ATi chipset. ASRock never fail to shock us by their innovation. Never did I expect them to pair up an older RD480 with the newest SB600 from ATi for CrossFire solution!. On the ALiveXFire-eSATA2, the ATi RD480+SB600 pair is used to support dual PCIe x8 for CrossFire or single PCIe x16.ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2 Review
This board supports Dual 8x PCIe for CrossFire, DC-DDR2-533/667/800, GbE, 4 SATA II with 2 can be paired up for eSATA connection. It has HDMI_SPDIF header to provide audio thru the HDMI VGA card. It also has 7.1 HD audio and attained the Windows Vista Premium Hardware Ready and can run Windows MCE. It is also AMD ALive! Ready!
With AMD+ATI merger, it would mean that AMD will pay more emphasis to give more support to the ATi chipsets. ASRock can foresee the market paradigm shifting towards ATi and come out with this latest board ALiveXFire-eSATA.
