Review Conclusion of ASRock G43Twins-FullHD Intel G43+ICH10 mainboard

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Review Conclusion of ASRock G43Twins-FullHD Intel G43+ICH10 mainboard
Bluetooth 15 Oct 2008

Conclusion

The ASRock G43Twins-FullHD is the first G43 board we tested. In the past we have tested the G45 and were impressed with low CPU utilisation. We were truly surprised by the fact that Intel G43 does equally well with matured drivers in delivering good image quality and low cpu utilisation when decoding HD titles.

In terms of 3D DX9 and DX10 performance, the G43 and G45 chipset doesn't seem to differ too much in performance. In fact, we found that the bottleneck is in the iGPU. Thus, it might no be a good idea to pair up a high end processor with the G43 or even the G45 boards.

Features-wise, the board has a number of options already pre built in the chipset and on board. There are also 6 SATA II ports supporting raid 0,1,5,0+1. There is also GbE, HDA etc. It is also the first board to support DisplayPort through the DisplayPort card (with DVI on the card too).

As for CPU overclocking, the BIOS do have options to set the CPU Freq of (200~800MHz), multiplier, async memory settings and voltage options. See gallery for more information. In our test with the max CPU Freq, we managed to push it up to 340 x 6. That seems to be the highest we can reach for a E6550 Processor on board. The G45 we tested was able to go higher at 420x6.

In conclusion, the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD board has one of full proof solution for the future. Supporting both DDR2 or DDR3, it allows you to upgrade accordingly. Just like the G45 board, it's capability of playing back of HD movies in H.264/VC-1 with lower CPU utilisation, this chipset does perform very well in Multimedia playback, but lack the punch for 3D when the Integrated graphics is concerned. Unfortunately, there is no HDMI, eSATA and 1394 support on this board. Otherwise, it would be a full complete and future proof solution for the LGA775 processors (up to FSB1333).

Discuss

Pros

Excellent Image quality
Low CPU Utilization when playing back AVC/Mpeg4
DisplayPort, DVI, D-SUB support
DDR2 or DDR3 support

Cons

no debug led
no eSATA,
no 1394
Jumpers are confusing

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Category	Score
Performance	7 / 10
Features	8 / 10
Ease Of Installation	10 / 10
Overclocking Features	8 / 10
Documentation	7 / 10
Packaging	8 / 10
Cost / Performance	8 / 10
Overall Rating :	8 / 10

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