ASRock Penryn 1600SLI-110dB : Penryn on the 650i, are you kidding me?
by Gary Key on February 15, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Penryn Overclocking Preview of the ASRock Penryn 1600SLI-110dB -
It seems as of late that the spotlight in the world of motherboards has definitely been on the Intel X38/X48 and NVIDIA 780i/790i chipsets with the introduction of the Wolfdale and Yorkfield processor families. These are the latest and greatest chipsets in the market (X38/780i) or will be (X48/790i) shortly. While the peformance of these chipsets are impressive, so are the prices. In fact, boards based on these chipsets are outside the budget requirements of many who might be thinking an upgrade to the new Penryn series of processors is in order. An upgrade that looks very attractive considering the price and performance of the E8400 (3.0GHz) dual core or the upcoming Q9300 (2.5GHz) quad core compared to the early Core 2 Duo processors.
What can the budget upgrader do in this case? Well, the first item of business is to visit the manufacturer's website to see if your current board supports the new Wolfdale and Yorkfield processors. If so, this generally requires a BIOS update in order to implement the necessary support for these processors. Even if support is stated, we highly suggest you visit the manufacturer's support forums, our own forums, or those on other websites to see just how well your board works with these new processors. We published an article last fall that discussed the plans of the chipset and motherboard manufacturers to provide a wide range of support for the new Penryn processor series. We will be updating that article shortly with actual results and unfortunately, several of them are unacceptable.
Why you might ask? Well, pull out every excuse you ever used in school for a late assignment or bad test grade and that will pretty much sum up where we are at right now. There are several logical reasons for this and some that are not, but that is for another time. Today, we are taking a look at the ASRock Penryn 1600SLI-110dB to see how well it overclocks our E8400 and QX9650 processors. We will be taking a more in-depth look at its performance against the mighty 780i in SLI (a surprise outcome) and overall performance against like priced P35 boards from MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, and abit in the coming days. However, we thought it would be wise to spend some time and burn a couple of pages on the touted Penryn compatibility before we look at other results.
Ever since this board arrived in our labs, we have been somewhat enamoured of it from a price to performance perspective. Also, we appreciate creative engineering techniques and we have to say that ASRock seems to excel in this area. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." seems to be ASRock's mantra when it comes to extracting performance and compatibilty out of chipsets that have long ago been discarded for the latest and greatest. Their latest feat utilizes the NVIDIA 650i SLI SPP and nForce 430 MCP that was introduced over a year ago and still provides a very good price sensitive platform for gaming, especially if you have an SLI setup.
The Penryn 1600SLI-110dB (these naming conventions can cause carpal tunnel syndrome) is a very well laid out motherboard considering the available features that we will discuss shortly. Of note, the board has three PCI Express x16 slots of which one (white) is designed to work at x16 speeds with a single graphics card setup. The two yellow x16 slots operate in x8 mode either individually or when two cards are paired up for SLI operation. You cannot use the single white x16 slot in conjunction with either x8 (yellow) slot. We did use either x8 slot in single graphics card mode and they worked fine, in fact, more than fine as benchmark scores indicated a variation of less than 2% in gaming compared to the x16 slot with our 8800GTS-512. The other notable point is the SPP (sliver) heatsink is just barely acceptable for cooling the C55 chipset when overclocked and with voltages at 1.382V. It requires very good airflow on and around the heatsink for stable overclock operation.
Let's take a quick look at the board's features and then overclocking results with Intel's latest processors.
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Odeen - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
1) Why the sudden urge to name a motherboard after the S/N ratio of the sound codec? Intel and (real) Asus boards with Soundmax codec chips, and pretty much anything with 24-bit audio processing capability can lay claim to supporting that high of a S/N ratio, yet only Asrock uses it in the model name.2) Having the ATX connector behind the CPU is SO 1999 and/or SO Epox. Just picture the ATX cable running to that location if you have a case with a bottom-mounted PSU (Such as the Antec P180/182). Do Do you drape the cable over the CPU cooler, or run it underneath? If you run it underneath, doesn't it push down on the video card? Lame.
3) Why do only Asrock and ECS feel the need to silkscreen words on the PCB. Oh look, we have "Gigabit lan" support. Oh wow, it's "DDR2" memory slots. Every 650i motherboard has dual core support, but only Asrock needs to brag about it through motherboard labels.
Nothing against the board (with the exception of the ATX connector). Just saw the picture of it, and the thoughts of every ECS board I've ever used came back :)
chrnochime - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
....And yet you have no problem with silly names like Asus' "Maximus Formula" or "StrikerII Formula"? Or Abit's "QuadGT"? I mean what kind of weird name is QuadGT? Is that a car? Or Abit Fatal1ty" Or Asus' use of "Republic of Gamers"?Sheesh...
Jjoshua2 - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
I'm glad the 110db isn't the sound level of a 5000+rpm fan on the chipset.JEDIYoda - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
seems to me as if you have issues with ASRock and ECS.....Personally again what are your issues in regards to this areticle??
imaheadcase - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
The ATX conneceter is fine, it just hooks to the PS, most just drape the remaing cable on backside of motherboard or on top of the PS.Its not a big deal with modular PS.
Heidfirst - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
It's not the only 650i SLI claiming Penryn support ...Mr Alpha - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
With the memory prices being what they are I've been putting a lot of thought to a 4x2GB RAM configuration. Overclocking and compatibility fears has stayed my hand though. Can I expect to see more about a 8GB memory configuration in future articles?Rajinder Gill - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
We will be incorporating both 4GB/8GB testing with the 2GB modules in our upcoming reviews. You are right, the current pricing is attractive, with 2x2 modules for 4GB becoming the wiser choice for performance oriented Vista 64 systems.regards
Raja
defaultex - Sunday, June 23, 2013 - link
Having overclocked my Q9450 on a MSI P7N Diamond Deluxe to 3.6Ghz stable. Now I'm using the same board listed in the article. Here are my findings thus far.On two sets of memory I have around it does not seem to detect the memory voltage or frequency correctly, it does at least detect timings correctly. Setting those manually in the BIOS reduced memory faults to a miniscule amount, leaving it at auto produced up to 50 faults per second in heavy programs.
Chipset voltage had to be bumped up a notch or two in order to get Windows to boot. This scares me since my previous board died from pushing the NB voltage over 1.4v. However the NB temp is much more stable than my previous board so it may not be an issue.
The VTT had to be bumped to stabalize Windows. Note that you should never push the VTT over your processors maximum rated voltage, doing so will damage the processor (though the damage may not be noticeable at first).
I hit a FSB hole at 390-410Mhz. Any frequencies in that range failed to POST, but going over it with the same voltages for 380Mhz worked with random haults inside of Windows (need to tweak the voltages a bit).