ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi Motherboard Review

Included Software

The ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi comes with two useful pieces of software, ASRock OC Tuner and Wifi-802.11g software.


Overall, the Wifi software was straightforward and user-friendly. The provided Wifi module supports two kinds of wireless network modes: Access Point Mode and Station Mode. Access Point Mode is used if the user wants to share Internet access with wireless stations in the local environment and in this mode the module becomes the wireless access point that provides LAN access to other wireless stations. Station Mode is used to connect directly to an access point or with other stations in wireless range.

Both modes worked well and wireless networks were found almost immediately. One point to note however, is Wifi must be enabled in the BIOS for the Wifi software to load.


The ASRock OC Tuner comes with four main screens, two containing monitoring features and two for real-time tweaking of voltages and frequency. The system health screen includes CPU and motherboard temperatures as well as fan speeds. The hardware monitor is more detailed and includes all temperatures and voltages monitored on the board as well as FSB, CPU, and memory frequencies.

The great feature on ASRock OC Tuner is the ability to set many overclocking settings in a Windows environment. CPU, RAM, VTT, NB, and SB voltages are all adjustable as well as the CPU ratio (multiplier), FSB frequency and PCIE frequency.

All features of the OC Tuner worked flawlessly and it really saves a lot of time when overclocking since the user does not have to reboot after tweaking every BIOS setting. Use extreme caution when playing with these settings as hardware damage and operating system corruption is possible if the user goes too far with an instable overclock.