ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi & P45R2000-WiFi

Last month we looked at the EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R motherboards from Gigabyte. These two Intel P45 motherboards had turned out to be great contenders as long as you are using a newer Linux distribution that ships with a very recent Linux kernel. Today though on the review block we have two new motherboards compliments of ASRock. The ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi and P45R2000-WiFi utilize the Intel P43 and P45 Chipsets, respectively, but the duo share the Intel ICH10R Southbridge and both feature an integrated 802.11g WiFi module along with system memory support for both DDR2 and DDR3 standards. There are also a few other extras with the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi such as ATI CrossFire support, dual Gigabit LAN, and two eSATA connectors. What's important though is whether these relatively low-cost motherboards work under Linux, and we will tell you that today.

P43R1600Twins-WiFi Features:

Processor
- LGA 775 for Intel Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Quad / Core 2 Duo / Pentium Dual Core / Celeron
- Supports Penryn Quad Core Yorkfield and Dual Core Wolfdale processors
- Supports FSB 1600/1333/1066/800 MHz
- Supports Hyper-Threading Technology
- Supports Untied Overclocking Technology
- Supports EM64T CPU

Chipset
- Northbridge: Intel P43
- Southbridge: Intel ICH10R

Memory
- Dual Channel DDR3/DDR2 memory technology
- 2 x DDR3 DIMM slots
- Supports DDR3 1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory
- Max. capacity: 4GB
- 4 x DDR2 DIMM slots
- Supports DDR2 1066/800/667 non-ECC, un-buffered memory
- Max. capacity: 16GB

BIOS
- 8Mb AMI BIOS
- AMI Legal BIOS
- Supports "Plug and Play"
- ACPI 1.1 Compliance Wake Up Events
- Supports Jumperfree
- SMBIOS 2.3.1 Support
- CPU, DRAM, NB, SB, VTT Voltage Multi-adjustment
- Supports I. O. T. (Intelligent Overclocking Technology)

Audio
- 7.1 CH Windows Vista Premium Level HD Audio with Content Protection
- DAC with 110dB dynamic range (ALC890 Audio Codec)
- DTS (Digital Theater Systems) support

LAN
- PCIE x1 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
- Realtek RTL8111B/RTL8111C
- Supports Wake-On-LAN

Wireless LAN
- 54Mbps IEEE 802.11g / 11Mbps IEEE 802.11b
- Supports Software Access Point mode (AP mode) and Station mode (Infrastructure mode and Ad-hoc mode)

Expansion Slots
- 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot (green @ x16 mode)
- 3 x PCI Express x1 slots
- 3 x PCI slots