Product Listing

Two in One - ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi

By Kenny Yeo - 25 Feb 2009

Overclocking & Test Setup

Overclocking

As a mainstream board targeted at the more budget-conscious crowd, we were not expecting too much from the ASRock P43 in the way of overclocking and even after many attempts, we managed only 420MHz for the FSB, which, even with our lowered expectations, was a bit disappointing. Pushing the FSB any further resulted in the board failing to boot, or a BSOD when Windows was loading.

One quirk of the board is that its FSB is, for some inexplicable reason, is always reported to be about 5MHz lower than what we applied in the BIOS.

The BIOS on the ASRock P43 did not stand out particularly, but it should do the job for casual users. Basic overclocking is possible but the more hardcore enthusiasts might want to look elsewhere as there are limited options for tweaking the North and Southbridge voltages. You can only set it in either one of five modes: auto, low, middle, high and highest. Worse still, we had no idea what voltages these denominations correspond to exactly.

  • FSB Settings: 200MHz to 800MHz
  • PCIe Settings: 50MHz to 150MHz
  • CPU Voltage Settings: 0.822V - 1.600V (in 6.25mV steps)
  • Memory Voltage Settings: 1.79V to 2.72V (in 0.06V steps)
  • MCH Core Settings: Auto, Low. Middle, High and Highest
  • ICH Core Settings: Auto, Low. Middle, High and Highest
  • CPU Ratio: 6 - 60

Test Setup

Since this ASRock P43 board supports both DDR2 and DDR3, we'll be running two sets of tests, once with DDR2 memory and the other with DDR3. Obviously, we are expecting the DDR3 results to be better. The following hardware configuration was used:-

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor (3.00GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-7-20 (for DDR3 testing)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-1066 @ 5-5-5-15 (for DDR2 testing)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB - with ForceWare 162.18 drivers
  • Intel INF 9.0.0.1007 and AHCI 8.0.0.1039 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

Since there is little to separate a P43 and P45 board on paper, we'll be comparing the ASRock P43 to some of the P45 boards (with a mix of DDR2 and DDR3 versions) we've tested earlier, namely:-

  • ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe (DDR3)
  • Gigabyte GA-EP45T-EXTREME (DDR3)
  • MSI P45D3 Platinum (DDR3)
  • DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS PLUS (DDR2)
  • Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P (DDR2)

These systems were tested with the exact same configurations as listed in our test setup above. The following benchmarks were used to determine the ASRock board's performance:

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004 (with Patch 2)
  • Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • AquaMark3
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