ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi & P45R2000-WiFi

BIOS:

Both the P43R1600Twins-WiFi and P45R2000-WiFi use an American Megatrends Inc BIOS. The options found within both BIOSes for these ASRock motherboards allow the CPU frequency bus to be increased up to 800MJz, PCI Express frequency up to 150MHz, CPU voltage up to 1.60V, DDR2 voltage up to 2.7V, and DDR3 voltage up to 2.4V. The options found within BIOSes provided by ASRock are often not the most elaborate, but they get the job done and are adequate for most users.

Performance:

Our system setup for testing out ASRock's P43R1600Twins-WiFi and P45R2000-WiFi had consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR2-1066MHz system memory, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX 512MB graphics card. On the OS side was Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 with the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, X Server 1.4.99.906, and GCC 4.3.

Due to the newer Intel ICH10/ICH10R Southbridge used on these motherboards, a relatively recent Linux kernel is needed to support the Serial ATA capabilities. Ideally, the Linux distribution should be using at least the Linux 2.6.26 kernel. Aside from this caveat, both motherboards had worked great under Linux and were running great in this Ubuntu 8.10 development build. When it comes to system sensor monitoring with the Winbond W83627DHG-A Super I/O ASIC, like the ASUS P5E64 WS Professional, the +5.00V and +12.00V rails weren't detected. The Realtek RTL8187L WiFi works usually with ndiswrapper, but it can be flakey at times and certainly isn't an ideal wireless chipset for Linux.

For benchmarking the ASRock P43 and P45 motherboards we had used our PCQS motherboard tests within Phoronix Test Suite 1.2.0 Beta 2. These tests consisted of timed PHP compilation, timed Apache compilation, timed Gzip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, GnuPG file encryption, OpenSSL, RAMspeed, and Sunflow Rendering System. The performance of these two motherboards was compared to the recently reviewed Gigabyte EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R.