Review Conclusion of ASRock X48TurboTwins-WiFi Intel X48 chipset mainboard review

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Review Conclusion of ASRock X48TurboTwins-WiFi Intel X48 chipset mainboard review
Bluetooth 15 Jun 2008

Conclusion

it is always never late to release superior board based on announced chipsets. ASRock's first product based on the Intel X48 chipset sends a signal to us that they're a serious contender in the market place. Not only does ASRock want to be valid in the entry and mid range market, it puts effort into it's design to build boards beyond what the traditional makers do.

While most people would say, this board doesn't support SLI. Well, the INTEL x48 has been tested with CrossFire and we see that it is a serious performer in our Radeon HD4850 tests done on this same board shows that it exceeds a pair of 9800GTX in SLI.

Features wise, this board has almost you can think of 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 most of the benchmarks even when it is paired up with DDR2 memory. Do take note that Intel X48 does not support DDR2-1066 by default (chipset limitation). ASRocks runs it at DDR2-960. With DDR3, it takes the performance to another level.

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 540MHz x6 (single ddr3) or 520MHz x6 (dual ddr3) using the ASRock OC Tuner. The voltage levels are shown in the diagram below.

In conclusion, ASRock has again impressed me with this new product. The specifications is comparable to boards from the 1st tier manufacturers. If you are looking for a LGA775 board that support the Wolfdale/Yorkfield processors and wants CrossFire support, this board is definitely worth considering as it will be priced very competitively against the new boards out there.

Discuss

Pros

Overclocking features
ASRock OC Tuner
eSATA
1394
Wifi/AP

Cons

Voltage options showing Auto,mid,high etc. should have use volts instead

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Category	Score
Performance	10 / 10
Features	10 / 10
Ease Of Installation	10 / 10
Overclocking Features	9 / 10
Documentation	8 / 10
Packaging	10 / 10
Cost / Performance	8 / 10
Overall Rating :	9.1 / 10

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