Motherboards
ASRock P43R 1600 Twins-110dB
| Manufacturer: | Price: |
| £61.99 inc VAT |
| Reviewer: | Review Date: |
| James Gorbold and Mark Mackay | Oct 2008 |
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| Speed | 35/45 | 78% |
| Features | 22/30 | 73% |
| Value | 20/25 | 80% |
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Verdict: A veritable treasure trove of oddities.
This model from ASRock is in keeping with the company's history of producing quirky motherboards. Armed with Intel's P43 chipset, it provides support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. Given that DDR3 memory costs much more than DDR2 and provides little or no increase in performance, the usefulness of DDR3 on such a cheap motherboard is negligible. For this reason, we decided to test it using DDR2 memory.
It's the cheapest LGA775 motherboard in the Labs test, and lacks some features, such as cooling for the VRMs and a second high-speed PCI-E slot. There's also only one free 3-pin fan header. Another quirk is the position of the 24-pin ATX power socket, which is awkwardly tucked away behind the Northbridge heatsink. Six RAID-capable SATA-II ports and one eSATA port for storage are present, while ten USB 2 ports and two FireWire ports provide connections for your peripherals.
The ASRock may be cheap but it was the second-fastest board in our Media Benchmarks with an overall score of 956.
Adjusting the CPU and memory voltage settings is much as it is in other BIOSes. However,to change the Southbridge, Northbridge, PLL and FSB voltages you have to use settings that range from 'low' to 'very high', with no indication of the actual voltages. We tried the high setting, as the motherboard provides no cooling for its VRMs. At these settings, the ASRock could only run our benchmarks stably with a maximum FSB of 400MHz, overclocking our test CPU from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz. However, even with its limited maximum stable FSB, the ASRock still ran faster than some of its more expensive rivals, with the overclock boosting the overall benchmark score to 1,123.
While the ASRock's performance out of the box is particularly good, the 400MHz maximum stable FSB and basic BIOS seriously limit its overclocking potential. Considering that the Biostar TPower I45 costs only £24 more, it would be the obvious choice for the discerning overclocker. However, if for some unfathomable reason you have no plans to overclock, it's a very worthy contender for your money.
