Review Conclusion of ASRock 4Core1600P35-WIFI+ Intel P35/ICH9R chipset mainboard review
Bluetooth 9 Jan 2008

Conclusion

ASRock surprised everyone with their entry into the mid range market with the release of the ASRock 4Core1600P35-WIFI+. As we have mentioned before, we have never seen such a high specification board from ASRock reviewing their products all these years.

Based on the Intel P35 + ICH 9R chipsets. The board supports all LGA 775 for Intel® CoreTM 2 Extreme / CoreTM 2 Quad / CoreTM 2 Duo / Pentium® Dual Core / Celeron®, supporting Penryn Quad Core Yorkfield and Dual Core Wolfdale processors. The board also incorporates a all solid capacitor design.

For those who can't afford the DDR3 modules, you can use DDR2 with this board and upgrade to DDR3 in the future. The board supports Dual Channel DDR3 1333/1066/800 (2 x DIMM slots) with max. capacity up to 4GB and Dual Channel DDR2 1066/800/667 (4 x DIMM slots) with max. capacity up to 8GB.

There is also support ATi CrossFire, GbE, 1394, 6 x Serial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and Intel® Matrix Storage), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions with 1 x eSerial ATAII 3.0 Gb/s connector (shared with 1 SATAII port). 1 x WiFi header and 7.1 CH Windows® Vista™ Premium Level HD Audio with Content Protection, supports DAC with 110dB dynamic range (ALC890 Audio Codec), DTS (Digital Theater Systems) support. The back panel has 2 x RJ-45 LAN Port LED, 1 x eSATAII port, 1 x IEEE 1394 ports, 4 ready-to-use USB ports. Other features include support of I. O. T. (Intelligent Overclocking Technology), ASRock OC Tuner. The package includes free Bundle: 1 x ASRock WiFi-802.11g Module and 1 x Antenna

Performance wise, this board performs on par with the high end Gigbayte X48T-DQ6 when we tested it using DDR3. In terms of overclocking, the BIOS comes pretty complete with large range of FSB and voltage options available. Unfortunately, the P1.00 seems to be locked in some ways, setting the DDR3 ram timing results in no boot. It also defaults the CAS latency to 6 instead of 7. You can see the BIOS options here.

In our o/c test, we used a E6300. Overclocking with DDR2 module seems to be easier than using DDR3. With our DDR2-800 module, we can set set option to run the module at DDR2-667 (min setting), this makes it difficult for us to overclock with this ratio of 266:333 (CPU:MEM). Using DDR3 modules, memory options available are only DDR3-800 or DDR3-1066, Running at DDR3-800 is the minimum setting we can choose. This results in a ratio of 266:400 and 266:533. Thus, it might be easier to lower the CAS Latency and pair the system with a high speed low CAS DDR3 module, perhaps a CAS 8 DDR3-1800. We also noticed that the memory CAS latency support seems to stop at CAS 6 with DDR3 module. Anything beyond, CAS 7,8,9 resulted in no POST at all. Looks like more work need to be done to solve these bios bugs. 1333MHz FSB CPUs probably gives better CPU:MEM ratios which can be used. I would assume that if we paired the board up with a 1333Mhz FSB CPU, CPU:MEM=1:1 can be chosen, in this case, when we o/c the 1333FSB CPU (333MHz effectively) to 500MHz, the memory will run at DDR2-1000, running the same CPU at 600MHz will only require the memory module to run at 600MHz (DDR3-1200) which is easily achievable. In this case, the memory module will not hinder the o/c process.

The screen shot below shows a E6300 o/c to 420x6 in BIOS, with DDR3 set to 1.82v, the rest are set to AUTO. In OC tuner, the FSB is further raised to 450MHz. Notice that the memory module is running at CAS 5, 9-9-12,2T at DDR3-1344 (675x2).

In conclusion, ASRock has impressed me with this new product. It is very complete and it is as good as the big brand ASUS or Gigabyte. If you want the best cost/performance Intel P35 board, ASRock 4Core1600P35-WIFI+ is definitely a good choice to consider.

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