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You can always rely on ASRock to come up with extremely affordable yet high quality motherboard. If you take a look at their website ... you can see that they offer one of the widest choice of motherboards available on the market. They cater for all types of users from low-end/budget to mainstream, and now it seems like they're targeting the highend user too. No matter who you are ... ASRock will have something to suit your needs.

What you'll find with most ASRock motherboards is that they're usually packed with features. Take for example the ASRock X48 TurboTwins-WiFi and the P45R2000-WiFi ... both of these motherboards feature dual memory slots for DDR2 and DDR3 ram, as well as support for onboard WiFi. But that's not it ... recently, ASRock have been making headlines with their overclocking ability on some of their motherboards. It seems that ASRock have really grown out of their comfort zone and become a serious motherboard contender. 

Over the past few years the motherboard market have been extremely competitive. Only the top three motherboard manufacturer (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) have enough headroom to ride out the recent economic downturn. Everyone' cutting back ... Foxconn gave us empty promises, to this date we haven't even tested a Foxconn motherboard. More worryingly, we've even seen manufacturers like Abit having to diversify their products to survive. In fact they are heavily reducing their motherboard production ... we haven't seen any new motherboads from Abit since their last release which used the P45 chipset. 

So where do ASRock stand in all of this? Well, you'll be surprise to know that they've been extremely resilient. They are probably one of the most successful mainstream motherboard manufacturers in recent times ... producing not just affordable motherboards for the mainstream users, but also quality motherboards using higher-end chipsets. This is all thanks to the massive infrastructure of their parent company Asus (Asustek), which provides and share some of the R&D, factories, shipping and marketing facilities ... all of these count towards the final product.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD motherboard. It features Intel's G43 chipset, accompanied by the ICH10 southbridge, and supports all Intel socket 775 processor upto an including Intel's Core™ 2 Extreme / Core™ 2 Quad / Core™ 2 Duo. The Intel G43 is an all-in-one chipset solution with integrated graphics in the form of Intel's GMA X4500. The motherboard supports both DDR3 and DDR2 ram upto a max. capacity of 4Gb and 8GB respectively. Included in the package is a separate daughter card that features a DVI and Display Port connectors but no HDMI.

As you can see from the above, the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD comes with quite a feature list. The only question is ... how well will it perform? There is how much competition out there, it's hard to say ... especially when you have AMD/ATI's amazing 790GX solution, not to mention Nvidia's Geforce 9400 mGPU chipset.

We'll be testing the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD using the usual PC Mark 2005, 3D Mark 2005 and 2006 tests, as well as the ScienceMark 2 benchmark. Our test rig includes an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ default 2.4Ghz, Kingston HyperX DDR2 PC2-9200 2Gb Kit, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245B LCD monitor. Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our OS.

OK, let's not waste any more time an take a look a closer look at the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD motherboard  ...