ASRock P45R2000-WiFi Motherboard Review

Voltage Regulation & Heat Analysis

Voltage Regulation

When evaluating a board’s voltage regulation, we first need to know what a few voltages refer to. More specifically vcore - BIOS set vcore, vcore in windows, and vcore under load. In theory these numbers should all be the same but load line droop (commonly known as Vdroop) is an intentional part of any Intel power delivery design specification.

Droop by definition is the real voltage delta from idle to load on a motherboard. Vdroop is usually larger for quads due to the extra power going through the voltage regulation integrated circuits and some boards have larger vdroop than others, depending partly on the quality of the voltage regulation of the board.

What we will look at on the P45R2000-WiFi is vdroop and how smooth the voltage line on an overclocked system is over a 5 hour period. For these tests OCCT monitoring is used.


For the overclocked tests, the voltage set in the BIOS for the Xeon chip is 1.475v, giving 1.450v idle and 1.385v load. Taking this into perspective it is not perfect, but not really that bad either. Ideally we like to see .02-.03v droop from idle to load but the P45R2000-WiFi gives closer to .065v droop on a 45nm chip. Setting 1.475v in the BIOS, a user may be surprised when they only see 1.385v under load, almost a full tenth of a volt below BIOS levels. It is also important to note the more voltage used, the harder the motherboard voltage regulation ICs must work and the higher the droop will be. Considering this board has a maximum of 1.6v available in the BIOS, users shouldn’t expect much over 1.49v load on a 45nm duo and even less with a quad. ASRock likely restricted vcore to 1.6v so users would not use more voltage than the voltage regulation transistors and ICs can handle safely.

Over the five hour test period, there are vcore fluctuations of 0.06v (4.4% ripple). This ripple is mainly due to vdroop and overall the line is pretty stable. Overall, voltage regulation is about average, but still decent for a budget board. It would, however, be nice to see more voltage available in the BIOS than 1.6v. A max of about 1.49v under load limits the board in terms of overclocking.


Heat Analysis

The Northbridge on the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi runs exceptionally cool, even without high-tech heatpipe cooling. Measuring the Northbridge heatsink with a digital thermometer temperatures hover around 34-36C, even when the system is at full load and Northbridge voltage set to Very High. We did replace the stock thermal paste with Artic Silver 5, but still this temperature is outstanding. ASRock was bang on when they saved users a few dollars by using a cheaper aluminum heatsink.


For CPU and board temperatures, everything things looks good. There are no particular hot spots on the board and even at 4005Mhz stressed for five hours, temperatures remained in check.