ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi Intel P43 chipset mainboard review

@ 2008/07/05
From the benchmarks, we have seen that P43 doesn't differ too much from the Intel X48 board. In fact, we would presume it to perform similar good compared to the P45 as they're generally the same 4 series chipsets. If we have paired it up with DDR3, it might not be as good as the X48TurboTwins-WiFi, that is because this board only supports up to DDR3-1333 and not DDR3-1600 (unless you o/c the ram).

Features wise, this board has almost you can think of it includes as Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s, 2 x IEEE1394 ports (one port on back panel, one header on board). In terms of expansion, it has 6x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, JBOD and RAID 5) and NCQ functions. Plug in the WIFI card and you can transform the system into a Access Point or use it plainly for accessing wireless networks.

In terms of overclocking, the BIOS comes pretty complete with large range of FSB and voltage options available. You can see the BIOS options here. To avoid overclocking CPU with a high RAM clk due to the CPU:MEM ratio, you can choose the FSB strap by setting the jumpers on board (see manua). In our o/c test, we used a E6550 processor that clocks at 7x333 and o/c it by lowering the multiplier to 6x and increase the cpu clk to 400 MHz by BIOS and raised it up to 420MHz by ASRock OC Tuner.

Comment from Sidney @ 2008/07/06
And, make sure the version comes with CD is the correct one; or you might be like me spending hours to find out what went wrong.
Comment from jmke @ 2008/07/06
most OC tools are. MSI CoreCenter is configured for each board independently to match the chipset's capabilities
Comment from Sidney @ 2008/07/06
ASRock OC Tuner is nice, but it is motherboard specific.