ASRock Motherboard Micro Q1900M

This is the core of a home built barcade running hyperspin for MAME and other emulators as well as some casual Steam games. It's not a powerhouse but it is quad-core and handles everything I've been throwing at it without issue. I am using the integrated video and sound with a 500 watt psu, single stick 8 GB Kingston HyperX FURY memory. I updated the BIOS before installing Windows 8.1 onto a Kingston 128 GB SSD drive. This mobo boots exceptionally fast, cold boot into Windows with the front-end loaded and waiting in under 10 seconds. Installation of Windows was seamless, I installed no additional drivers, everything was discovered and loaded during the installation. It plays nice with the ATmega328 controller which lets the joystick and button array navigate the Windows basics even outside of the front-end.I think this motherboard would be well suited for most casual users, small limited business owners, and even light gamers. I was able to get this board much cheaper than I see it advertised at the moment, I purchased mine for less than $50. The board and processor handle most but not everything, if you do not need the power then this is a sound choice for a cheaper build.

I've only had this thing one day and I have to say it's exactly what I was wanting. My old HTPC that used an i5-750 has died, and it's not easy to get a cheap LGA 1156 motherboard nowadays. So, what the hell was I gonna do with my old parts?Enter the Q1900m.While it's not as quick as my old i5 (of course) , it's as fast as a top-tier intel Core 2 Duo (2009 processor). I paired this with 4GB (2x2) of Adata 1600 ram and the ATI 5750 graphics card that was in my first HTPC. [** two slot graphics cards MAY interfere with SATA ports.** Right now, the top of the plastic heatsink shield of the 5750 goes perfectly between both SATA ports. If it were any higher or lower it probably could have removed access to one of them. ]Set up for this thing was really, really easy. Just threw a copy of windows 8 pro at it, and it's had no problems detecting on-board hardware, has had no heat issues, and performance is definitely as expected.Like I said, I didn't want to piss money away on an old ebay 1156 board, so this $70 purchase made sense for me. You can go with the BIOSTAR A68N-5000, which is the AMD equivalent I suppose. That board has a better integrated GPU, but I got this thing for the full-sized PCIe slot any way. Passmark compares the two here https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2005&cmp[]=2131If you hesitant, you might want to wait til black friday or something to see if the price comes down and makes this more appealing. But when I consider this is faster than the $1200 27" iMac my wife got in 2009-- $70's seems like a decent price point to me.

I purchased this to go into an ANTEC Aria Case. Would also like to run Ubuntu and the box will be principally a repository for photographs on a home network. The board is small; will fit nicely in the Aria Case. BUT... There is a parallel printer HEADER on the board - and no place for a parallel printer port on the back panel supplied with the board. I haven't seen a parallel printer in over 10 years. What's that all about?Also a TPM header which I read that someone in 2008 didn't know what that was for. I still don't and don't care. Now we come to the COM header on the motherboard but no jack location on the rear panel. Now I understand that there may have been a need for these two headers/ports (whatever). But not in this century. While some may see a need, I consider these obsolete technologies on an otherwise useful board. Could have used: 1. Another USB header to connect a Card read (useful these days) 2. Another SATA header - I will have 3 drives in this box and there are only 2 SATA headers. Researching other low power micro-atx boards, this still seems to be the closest to what I was looking for. But if the card reader doesn't connect, it's going back.Update... Card reader works... not problem. Still don't know why I need a serial header, parallel header, or the TPM thing. Has enough USB ports so that I will never need an external hub. Good board. A few wasted frills. No problem.

I bought 4 of these.Of the 4:1st: the first one never worked. (Sadly it took longer than the return period for me to discover this.)2nd: Unstable. HIGHLY unstable. If i'm lucky, I i'll get 10 hours out of this one before it freezes.3rd: After a lot of bios configurations / kernel hacks, this one actually worked well... for about 6 months. Starting this week, it is now the same status as the 2nd one. It freezes somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours.4th: Currently stable, but took a lot a configuration guessing (just like the 3rd one). But I have very little faith that it will be stable for very long.At first, I was very excited about these. They are not very powerful, but I was fine with the power they had. (when they work, they worked just fine for me.) In the end, I spent many, many hours debugging, swapping parts, and tracking down what parts of my builds went wrong. (in all cases, it was this motherboard.) How this product has so many good reviews is well beyond my understanding. If I had known that I would only have 1 good working computer in the end, I would have bought a single, much nicer motherboard.I bought these to save a little money... They turned out to be a huge loss in terms of both money and time!At this point, I have decided to cut my losses, and move on to something more stable.