Asrock 650i & 680i Based Motherboards

[VBTC]

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.

ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-WIFI Full Review

[Bad_Cop]

é razoável.. acho a bios algo pobre, mas pronto. a voltagem tambem não é nada por aí alem mas se o vdrop for reduzido é mais que suficiente para sistemas do dia a dia.

layout horrivel.

[VBTC]

Não sei bem até que ponto a BIOS não será uma versão inacabada já que parece pior que a da Twins-P35. Se vier a menos de 120 euros parece uma boa opção. Só acho aquela solução de cooling péssima, já que o 680i é quentinho e em SLI e Triple-SLI deve arder então.

[nuclear465]

Essa Asrock Penryn1600SLIX3-WiFi tem suporte pci-e 2.0 ? ou será que ainda não há nenhuma motherboard Asrock com pci-e 2.0 ? parece-me ser uma boa opção para quem não quer gastar muito dinheiro !!

[VBTC]

O 650i e 680i não suportam PCI-e 2.0.