The ASRock K8 Combo-Z/ASR is not the most user-friendly motherboard on the market, but then again with a retail price of just $91 CDN ($76 US) you can't expect the world. The motherboard is quite large but should work just fine with those smaller cramped cases since the board itself does not generate a lot of heat.

If you want to move between CPU sockets, you're going to have to adjust some jumpers on the left and a few others elsewhere on the board. Each row of jumpers is broken down into two sets of four which can be removed with the bundled jumper insertion tool.

Be warned though; do not lose any of the jumpers as ASRock does not include any spares! During testing, one set fell to the floor and I spent about ten minutes looking for it.... Of course it didn't help that the jumpers are the same colour as the carpet.

The layout of the motherboard could have been better, but with two CPU sockets things can't always be placed at their ideal location. I wish ASRock had put the floppy drive connector elsewhere though; in its current position at the bottom of the board, the cable will have to wrap around all the other devices in the system.

ASRock has decided to equip both CPU sockets with a non-standard CPU retention mechanism, so installation of the larger 3rd party Athlon64 heatsinks may not always be possible. On the bright side, standard coolers for Socket 478 Pentium 4 chips will actually fit in K8 Combo-Z/ASR's retenion brackets, so you can also use pretty much any Socket 478 Pentium 4 cooler with this motherboard! Not bad I guess, considering there is a large array of Socket 478 heatsinks on the market.