ASRock G43Twins-FullHD Motherboard

First Look and Board Layout:

The ASRock G43Twins Full-HD motherboard comes in a white and green box sporting the ASRock logo and the features of the board. The back of the box shows on of the features of the board which is a display port card. This is free add-on card that plugs into your PCI-e slot to give you more video options, but more on that later. The back of the box also shows many of the awards that ASRock motherboards have recently received.

Opening the box reveals the included accessories. There is a manual, a driver and application disc, SATA cable, 4-pin molex to SATA power cable, IDE cable, floppy cable, and a motherboard I/O cover. The other item included in the accessories is the Display Port card. This card allows you to use DVI or DisplayPort to video your video signal digitally instead of the onboard VGA port. Unfortunately we did not have displays that supported this so we had to use DVI.

DisplayPort is a digital display interface standard put forth by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) since 2006. It defines a new license-free, royalty-free, digital audio/video interconnect, intended to be used primarily between a computer and its display monitor, or a computer and a home-theater system.

This brings us to the board itself which is designed around a blue green PCB. The layout of the board is pretty standard for a mATX form factor. There is a 1x PCI-e slot, followed by a 16x PCI-e slot and two standard PCI slots under that. I like that the 1x PCI-e slot is above 16x PCI-e slot because many graphics cards with oversized heatsinks block the use of the at least one slot below them.

The CPU socket all of the capacitors are low enough to accommodate a large majority of heatsinks out there. Unfortunately not all of the capacitors on this board are solid, only the ones providing power to the CPU.