Review Conclusion of ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-WIFI NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset mainboard review

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Review Conclusion of ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-WIFI NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset mainboard review
Bluetooth 25 Mar 2008

Conclusion

ASRock's entry into the high end market is really a pleasant surprise for us here. This new board based on an aging chipset does give us a surprise in it's performance and ability to support the newer processors out there. Not only that, it is also the first ASRock board to incorporate a heatpipe to cool the north south bridges.

In terms of features, the board supports supports Dual Channel DDR2 800/667/533 x 4 DIMM slots, maximum capacity up to 8GB. As it comes with 3 full length PCIe x16 slots but electrically wired at 8+16+16. This enables one to run in Full SLI with Dual PCIe x16. With 3 8800GTX cards, 3 way SLI can be achieved by installing the third card into the PCIe x8 slot. Two type of SLI connectors are bundled in the package.

Other than that, the board has a complete feature set, 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.

Performance wise, this board wins some and lose some when compared to the Gigabyte P35T-DQ6 mainboard paired up with 2GB of DDR3-1066 modules. The graphics performance improved further when we pair up another 9600GT to the board for SLI. The interesting observation is that it's brother the Penryn1600SLI-WIFI does pretty well too in SLI (dual 8x). This is probably due to the fact that both 9600GT isn't able to fully tap the power of dual 16x.

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. 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 469MHz. The memory is set to DDR2-533 so that it won't be the bottleneck in our o/c test. Voltages are also increased to ensure more stability. Vcore is set to 1.46v, Vdimm to 2.2v, Vtt to 1.33v, Chipset voltage to 1.382v. We also used the OC tuner and managed to get it up to 469x6. See diagram below.

During our test, we find that the north bridge and south bridge heatsink is exceptionally hot. We have enquired about this and the official reply was that the chipset is able to withstand high temperatures. Although it is hot, the heatpipe seems to help a lot in contrast to the heatsinks only solution on the Penryn1600SLI-110db board.

In conclusion, ASRock has impressed me with this new product. The specifications is comparable to boards from the 1st tier manufacturers. If you are looking for a LGA775 board that support the Wolfdale/Yorkfield processors and wants SLI performance, this board is definitely worth considering as it will be priced very competitively against the new boards out there.

Discuss

Pros

Overclocking features
2 way SLI support + 3 way SLI
ASRock OC Tuner
eSATA
1394
Wifi/AP

Cons

Chipset gets very hot during operation

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Category	Score
Performance	9 / 10
Features	10 / 10
Ease Of Installation	10 / 10
Overclocking Features	9 / 10
Documentation	8 / 10
Packaging	10 / 10
Cost / Performance	8 / 10
Overall Rating :	9.1 / 10

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