Product Listing

Two in One - ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi

By Kenny Yeo - 25 Feb 2009

ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi

The ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi

At first glance, you'll find that there's actually little that is unique about the ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi (henceforth known as ASRock P43), apart from its six DIMM slots. It has six because it supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory (two DDR3 and four DDR2 slots). You can't use them simultaneously of course, but the ability to accept either type of memory can come in useful for those looking to take advantage of the cheaper DDR2 memory prices now, while hedging their bets with the possibility of upgrading to DDR3 memory in the future when the prices become more attractive. For example, one can go with the base-level Pentium Dual-Core processor and DDR2 memory now and perhaps upgrade the system with a high speed Core 2 Duo and DDR3 memory in future.

The area around the CPU socket is uncluttered, meaning it'll easily accomodate all but the largest of third party coolers.

The ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi has six DIMM slots for both DDR2 and DDR3 support. The two DDR3 slots can support up to 4GB of memory, whereas the other four DDR2 slots can do 8GB. Note also the absence of the ATX power socket, it has been shifted upwards beyond the Northbridge.

The board has all the ports that most users would need: six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs, a RJ45 LAN port, a FireWire port, HD audio jacks and PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse. Though there's an eSATA port at the rear I/O shield, but for it to work ...

... a pass through cable must be connected to this header located just behind the rear I/O shield to the main SATA headers near the ICH chip.

Note the two SATA headers circled green. These two must be connected to enable the eSATA port that the rear I/O shield.

The board has six SATA ports. To enable eSATA on the rear I/O shield, you need to connect a pass through cable to the one in orange.

The ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi has a single PCIe x16 slot for your graphics card, three PCIe x1 slots, and an additional three PCI slots.

Surprisingly, in this time and age, we somehow seemed to have encountered an IRQ assignment/conflict issue with this board. The onboard HD audio just could not co-exist with our Ethernet PCI card and we repeatedly failed when installing the HD audio drivers, forcing us to disable the sound and rely on an external sound card for our testing.

If you are really sharp-eyed, however, you may notice a weird header just in between the PCIe x1 and PCI slots. If you are still wondering, that is for the Wi-Fi module. As the board's name implies, the ASRock P43 is capable of Wi-Fi connectivity right out of the box by means of a Wi-Fi module, which we think is rather useful as you wouldn't need to obtain an external/internal wireless adapter.

To have Wi-Fi connectivity, all you need to do is install this module on the board and hook it up to the little rubberized W-iFi antenna.

This is how the Wi-Fi module will look like once installed. It might make the neighboring PCIe x1 and PCI slots unusable, but we doubt that's going to be an issue.

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