ASRock Penryn1600SLI-110dB

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Gary Key
2. The cooling solution will not be upgraded before retail shipments. I will not kid you, this thing gets hot as hell for lack of better words.

Nothing a Thermalright HR-05/IFX can't fix.

 

[Gary Key]

Originally posted by: Zap

Originally posted by: Gary Key
2. The cooling solution will not be upgraded before retail shipments. I will not kid you, this thing gets hot as hell for lack of better words.

Nothing a Thermalright HR-05/IFX can't fix.

I ordered one today just to see.... At 1.384V (max ASRock recommends but BIOS goes to 1.5) the heatsink is around 74C at load.

 

[Johnbear007]

Anything new on this yet? Did I miss the update/blog?

 

[JustaGeek]

Now available at Newegg for $104.99 + $6.61 S&H.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...el-_-ASRock-_-13157120

But the NB Heatsink is soooooo tiny!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...+ATX+Intel+Motherboard

 

[JustaGeek]

First impressions by Gary Key:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3227&p=4


"...based on what we have seen out of ASRock in the past few months, we would not hesitate to recommend this board for someone looking for a solid gaming platform, especially if SLI is important. We say this without showing the rest of our cards on the table, but this board is already a diamond in the rough for those looking to marry an E8400 with a couple of 8800GT's. How it will fair in the end against the likes of the abit IP35-E and Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L is something we will answer shortly."

 

[fnaves]

So what about the results from this board vs 780????

Don't we have a 2nd part to the article???

I just bought the board+e8400+4gb gskill pc6400 cl4, after a crazy week with a lot of BSOD i learned an important thing that i would like to share -> never trust default bios settings... and never trust a memory tester you might send to garbage a good stick of ram or even 2

 

[mkloharry]

I had this board for about 2 weeks, been stable no issuses. I did put a Zalman fanless north bridge heatsink on the board, have good air flow in case. I am running a E4400 800mhhz bus 2000mhz @ 3000mhz, with just a slight vcore increase. I use to play HDDVD & BluRay disc, have a MSI 8600 fanless GTS. Plays all disc with or without hardware acelleration no problems. I haven't had time to see if I can bump up the speed anymore, built system went it bios bump up speed and vcore 3000mhz, then installed Vista been stable since install not 1 issue. The sound is very good for onboard

 

[fnaves]

Not sure what has the problem, just changed the bios settings from Auto to manual and now is 100% stable, 10390 3dmark06 with a 8800gts320mb all stock no OC.

 

[mkloharry]

Gary any word on a bios that can change mutiplier? Did you notice the reported temps seem to be high at a cold start about 10c. I believe Sandra is reporting the right temps. The only issue I have with this board I get a moderate chirping squel sound during intense hard disk activity, not from the hard drive but seems to come from the motherboard. I am 100% sure it is not the hard drive. When I get some time I am going to pull the motherboard out to see if I can find were it is coming from, any ideas? I read some where that nforce boards do chirp squel sometimes. I am debating to rma this board if I can't find why it chirps. What is strange if I benchmark the HD with HD Tach the squel chirp is only heard during the cpu and sequential read test. I use this computer as a HTPC and the squel chirp is just loud enough to hear over my very quiet case and cpu fans. Also the chirp squel is there at stock speeds no overclock.

Thanks for any suggestios

 

[Johnbear007]

Originally posted by: Gary Key
Hi,

1. I had to go back and run the 780i benchmarks again, just to make sure of the results. Results that have really surprised me with SLI enabled. Our first part goes up on Tuesday night and is a comparison on SLI performance with the QX9650 and 8800GTS-512 cards which should be interesting. The full board goes up next week in the budget board shootout, ASUS did send us a 750i board so it will not just be P35 versus 650i. Also, everything from a E2160 to E8500 ran fine in this board with the latest BIOS, overclocking is generally okay, not as good as the P35 boards but if you want a stable SLI platform, ASRock nailed it.

2. The cooling solution will not be upgraded before retail shipments. I will not kid you, this thing gets hot as hell for lack of better words. However, stability was never an issue in testing although we have very good airflow across it in our CM830 Stacker case.

3. I am hoping to get the updated BIOS before the roundup, 8GB testing is not good right now with the 1333 processors, 4GB is very stable though.

Can you suggest a northbridge replacement cooler that will fit this board? That would be super helpful.

 

[Johnbear007]

Originally posted by: Johnbear007

Originally posted by: Gary Key
Hi,

1. I had to go back and run the 780i benchmarks again, just to make sure of the results. Results that have really surprised me with SLI enabled. Our first part goes up on Tuesday night and is a comparison on SLI performance with the QX9650 and 8800GTS-512 cards which should be interesting. The full board goes up next week in the budget board shootout, ASUS did send us a 750i board so it will not just be P35 versus 650i. Also, everything from a E2160 to E8500 ran fine in this board with the latest BIOS, overclocking is generally okay, not as good as the P35 boards but if you want a stable SLI platform, ASRock nailed it.

2. The cooling solution will not be upgraded before retail shipments. I will not kid you, this thing gets hot as hell for lack of better words. However, stability was never an issue in testing although we have very good airflow across it in our CM830 Stacker case.

3. I am hoping to get the updated BIOS before the roundup, 8GB testing is not good right now with the 1333 processors, 4GB is very stable though.

Can you suggest a northbridge replacement cooler that will fit this board? That would be super helpful.

bump for this question.

 

[Arnejoh]

I have recently had 3 top of the line Asus motherboards that has gone into failed state. 1 of this mobos works with only one ram stick in it, and is based on intel 975x chipset. The last and most recent board was the p5n32e-SLI. This board worked great with my q6600@3.4ghz and one 8800gt after i found some working fsb. But when i got the last 8800gt to run SLI it only survived two cod 4 games before i got the bsod and after that it wont work anymore at all(suspects overheating). After reading about all the quad on 680i problems i was allmost ready to give up SLI and Asus and get my self a god mobo based on the intel x38 chipsett.

But then i read this article on this mobo here at Anandtech. I've only had one Asrock board before and it work well enuff. Since i did not want to wait for the rma of the other mobo i needed a cheap substitute. So i ordered this board, it looks good enuff, but there is several severe problems i have noticed over the last two days:
1. The volt regulators at the base of the mobo is whining like the old modems we had before when they connected. This is going on all the time, and the high pitch is driving me crazy.
2. This board really sucks regarding to overclocking my q6600, the old p5n32e-SLI could do 425 fsb stable@3.4ghz, this board can do 425 with lower fsb, but fails when the cpu is pushed over 2.7ghz. This is the same with higher multi and the same cpy frequenzy. I have now water cooled both gpus and chipset and temps are very low. Like 45 degree celsius with a lot of chipset volt. Even tried setting all volts on mobo to max just to try. Did not give me more stable speed.
3. Slow poster, after i upgraded to bios 1.3 it got a lot slower to get over post screen.
4. Problems using my to extra sata disks when raid is enabled.
5. Wont get over post screen with 8GB ram

So my rating is very low...it works but so does allmost every normal 650i card at the same price range. And the extra cpu support is the only real charming ting for me as for now, and the fact that sli is stable. But sli on a quad at only 2.4 ghz is waste. It gives me a 4000-5000 point lower score in 3dmark06 then i had with 680i and the same cpu@3.4ghz. So with loosy overclocking this is realy holding me back...if it was not so cheap i would return it instantly.

 

[toadeater]

ASRock is ASUS' budget subsidiary. So I guess your Asus curse continues to plague you. I also think you expect too much from this budget board. You should contact them about the 8GB RAM issue though.

If you wanted to overclock with a cheap motherboard, you should have gotten a Gigabyte P35-DS3L, or Abit IP35-E.

 

[panfist]

So at the end of this motherboard review it says that these are initial thoughts. I'm interested in getting one of these but I would like a little more info from anandtech.

Is more info actually coming, or did you guys get distracted by other stuff...

 

[panfist]

Bump for the invisible followup article! I know anandtech has a lot of motherboard reviews in the pipeline. I really appreciate the other coverage they have been giving the motherboard market, but now that we have a good idea of the big picture, I want to see some in-depth analysis.

 

[Pirate Neilsouth]

This board suffers from severe vdroop and for example a voltage of 1.4 will give you 1.32 or less under load in prime. A higher vcore is needed to compensate . This board also will not go over 340fsb whatever the setting in bios for example below

340X9 = 3076mhz

Core 1.443V
Vtt - 1.42V
GTLREF - High
NB chipset - 1.382V Have also tried 1.56V

Memory was running 1:1 so only 340mhz its rated at 400mhz(800ddr2) so underclocking the ram , even on a divider still no go.

Dropped the multiplier to 8x and raised the fsb so the core was lower and it failed prime within 10mins from 340fsb upwards.

The northbridge has a cooler on it as without it it gets incredibly hot to the point of finger burning within 5secs , as a budget board its great but i'm dissapointed in the fsb limitation. So i will now look for another motherboard which will do 400mhz and vdroop load line calibration.

Using 1.40 Bios , i did read the review and saw a much higher fsb and also minimal vdroop so i can't understand why mine won't go that high!