A Closer Look at the Penryn1600SLIX3-WiFi


Looking at the board layout, ASRock keeps consistent with past designs in terms of both layout and color scheme. The PCB is the trademark blue with orange and yellow RAM slots and orange SATAII connectors. The layout is quite intuitive, over than an oddly placed 20/24 pin ATX connector situated up near the I/O panel instead of typical location of the bottom of the board near the RAM slots. This strange placement is found in other ASRock boards and remains on the Penryn1600SLIX3-WiFi likely because it would be quite expensive to move from a manufacturing standpoint. The issue one may face is with a bottom mounted power supply where the ATX power cable would have to stretch past and above the GPU, making hiding wires very difficult. It could also interfere with larger aftermarket CPU coolers.

Another interesting feature is the lone SATA header right next to the rear I/O ports which is used for the eSATA connector on the back of the motherboard. Running one of your SATA cables all the way up there is necessary if you want the eSATA port to work.

Finally, mention has to be made about the layout of the expansion card slots. Fortunately, it looks like the ages-old PCI interface may finally be drawing its last breath but nonetheless, manufacturers tend to give it priority over the newer PCI-E 1x slots and ASRock has done just that with this board. Basically, if you use a pair of dual-slot graphics cards you can forget about using either of the PCI-E 1x slots sice the will be covered by the GPU coolers. We would have much rather seen one of the PCI-E slots being located below the yellow PCI-E 8x slot.


The 12V connector is in a typical spot, next to the CPU socket and there is enough distance between this connector and the CPU socket there should be no clearance issues even with a large aftermarket heatsink.


The Northbridge and Southbridge coolers use a heatpipe design and are a nice touch for both aesthetics and cooling. These are a far cry from what we have seen on past ASRock motherboards but we will nontheless look at temperatures and cooling performance a little further on since the 680i tends to be a hoot-running chipset.


For fan headers, there are only two; the 4-pin for the CPU fan and the 3-pin chassis fan header at the bottom of the board near the SATAII ports. This means if you run extra fans they will have to be wired direct to the power supply which is definately a bit of a pain. If ASRock wants to market this products to enthusiasts, they will need to do better than this when it comes to fan headers.

In this picture you may also have noticed that there is one orange SATA port amidst a sea of red connectors. This is the port which ASRock recommends you hook up via an SATA cable to the (also orange) SATA connector near the back panel which provides a link to the eSATA port. Having these color coded is a huge bonus since it leaves alot of guesswork out of this part of the installation process.


The VIA Fire IIM VT6308S 1394 Host Controller is a IEEE 1394 high-speed serial bus used for PCI peer-to-peer interconnections. More popularly known as "Firewire", it is commonly used for transferring large audio and video files from various devices.

Meanwhile, the BIOS chip is removable on this board which makes it nice if you corrupt a BIOS during a flash. If this happens, the BIOS chip can be easily removed and a new one put in without having to RMA the entire board. To avoid this issue it is a good idea to always flash from a floppy or a USB drive and not in Windows.


The Wifi card found on the Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi is the Realtek RTL8187L. According to Realtek, this is a budget IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Network Interface Controller with USB 2.0 Interface. Also included with the Wifi card is the wireless LAN module. ASRock provides an 802.11g Wifi module supporting 54Mbps IEEE 802.11g / 11Mbps IEEE 802.11b. This module also supports Software Access Point mode (AP mode) and Station mode (Infrastructure mode and Ad-hoc mode). The benefit users will find with this feature is avoiding stringing LAN cables if the PC is in an area with no accessible connections.


ASRock moved to all solid capacitors on this board which seems to be the trend even on budget boards these days even if this does represent a somewhat grondbreaking change away from ASRock's past boards. These caps are said to be of higher quality and more durable than the older electrolytic style capacitors which we see failing on older electronics.


The rear panel inputs and outputs are quite standard on this board other than one interesting addition: an eSATA port. Other I/O ports include: PS/2 Mouse Port, PS/2 Keyboard Port, COM1 Serial Port, Parallel Port (ECP/EPP Support), 4 x USB 2.0 Ports, RJ-45 LAN Port with LED, IEEE 1394 Port, and an HD Audio Jack. 4 USB ports doesnt seem like much nowadays; however, it is nice to see ASRock include the standard PS2 mouse port which is lacking on some recent ASUS boards.