ASRock


ASRock Inc. is a Taiwanese manufacturer of motherboards, industrial PCs and home theater PCs. Led by Ted Hsu, it was founded in 2002 and is currently owned by Taiwanese electronics company Pegatron.

History

ASRock Inc. is a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer which focuses on the development of motherboards, industrial PCs and HTPCs.
ASRock was originally spun off from Asus in 2002 in order to compete with companies like Foxconn for the commodity OEM market. Since then, ASRock has also gained momentum in the DIY sector and plans for moving the company upstream began in 2007 following a successful IPO on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
In 2010 it became part of Pegatron. Asrock currently produces consumer, server, workstation and HTPC motherboards.
ASRock has distributors in over 90 countries around the world and branches in Europe, US and China.
ASRock established itself as a server motherboard affiliate in April 2013, having received orders from 10 mid-size clients for server and industrial PC motherboards and forming partnerships with system integrators.
ASRock is the world's third largest motherboard manufacturer, having cooperated with Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel - 12 times FPS World Games championship record holder - in the development of a gaming-oriented enthusiast motherboard in 2011. Additionally, in early 2012 ASRock enlisted the help of HWBOT world overclocking champion, Nick Shih.

Products and services

Besides motherboards, ASRock also sells desktop minicomputers. Three ASRock products were short-listed for the 2012 Taiwan Brand Award for the first time, and then became endorsed products of the External Trade Development Council when they were promoting the quality image of Taiwan brands globally. In 2012, ASRock stepped into the industrial PC and server motherboard market. ASRock began developing graphics cards in partnership with AMD in 2018 as a result of the surge in cryptocurrency mining.

Market coverage

ASRock is the world's third largest motherboard brand and the distribution channels cover electronics stores, PC stores, gadget retailers and online shops. Major sales regions in 2011 included Europe for 37.68%, Central and South America accounted for 21.13%, the Asia Pacific region accounted for 40.95% and other markets accounted for only 0.24%. As a whole, ASRock accounted for a large proportion of sales in Asia and Europe in terms of overall performance.
The Top 3 Motherboard Brand
According to the annual report for Digitimes 2011, ASRock has been growing very fast in the past few years. ASRock has been one of the top 3 motherboard brands for 2 consecutive years.
Company2011 shipments2012 shipments
Asustek23.222.2
Gigabyte1718.5–19
ASRock7.88
MSI76
Biostar54.5
ECS54.5

Reception

ASRock received a Tom's Hardware 2012 Recommended Buy Award for their X79 Extreme4 motherboard, and also won the Xbit labs 2012 Editor Recommended Award with Z77 Extreme4. Furthermore, ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3, Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 and the mini PC series was awarded three 2011 Taiwan Brand Awards.
ASRock is also the first and only manufacturer of a Mini ITX-sized X99 chipset-based motherboard, the X99E-ITX/ac. It supports Haswell-E and Broadwell-E Intel Core i7 and Haswell-EP Intel Xeon CPUs with CPU core support up to 18 cores.