Since the launch of the GeForce 7 series of products Nvidia has for the most part executed it's product launches with attention and care. Products are usually at all retailers the day of the launch, reviews are plentiful, and the product is usually stable and ready to go. Unfortunately all of that hasn't been true for their integrated chipset, the GeForce 8200. A definite product launch never quite was and we've been waiting on a newer BIOS from Asus' 8200 motherboard for some time now while the 780G has been the champion of integrated graphics for the AMD platform. The boards though have been out for some time and today we have a new one to look at from ASRock who have been stepping up things as of late including with the ASRock K10N78hSLI-WiFi.

As with the 780a and other new Socket AM2+ chipsets Nvidia recently announced, the major change in this chipset is the inclusion of integrated video across the board. From the lowest-end to the highest. This is to allow for Nvidia to enable it's HybridPower technology across the board. What this does is enable for the primary PCI-Express graphics card to be disabled and for the integrated graphics to take over, thus saving power for what can be a very power hungry part of a computer. This function, however, requires a GeForce 9800 GTX or 9800 GX2 which makes it's use very limited for now until Nvidia applies it to more cards. Nvidia also allows for their GeForce boost technology which allows for SLI when a GeForce 8400GS or 8500GT is used with the integrated video. The ASRock still supports this function but onboard integrated video is not on the motherboard so if that is something you're looking for you'll want to look elsewhere. That said you can get much better video than the GeForce 8200 for $30 or less sot it isn't a huge burden for something better.

Another major feature of the new Nvidia chipsets including the GeForce 8200 is the support at last for HyperTransport 3.0 which allows for much more bandwidth (5.2GT/s). This is built on a new 65nm manufacturing process which also greatly reduces the heat and power consumption compared to previous motherboards. The ASRock is cooled only by a small heatsink on the Southbridge of motherboard and it does the job excellently without the need for anything more. The board is even quite an overclocker as were able to reach 2.9GHz although this wasn't stable. This is helped by the solid state capacitors used by ASRock.

The board is ATX but not full sizing in at 12.0-in x 8.4-in and fairly light and small motherboard if packing a large number of features. Placement is fine for most of everything except for the ATX power plug which is in-between the the processor and the PCI-E 16x slot putting it in a somewhat uncomfortable position for those with larger heatsinks. We were able to sneak it by with our larger ZeroTherm heatsink/fan but if you are using one of the largest heatsinks out there such as the Tuniq Tower it could be a very tight fit.

The board is 5 phase and features PCI-E 2.0 support with one main graphics card 16x lane, two PCI-Express 1x slots, three PCI slots, 7.1 HD Realtek audio, 802.11g Wi-Fi included with, six USB 2.0 slots, six SATA ports which support RAID, one E-SATA port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, one IDE port, firewire onboard the motherboard, four slots for up to DDR2 1066. So it is very feature rich motherboard ready to handle pretty much everything you can throw at it.

Accessories included with the ASRock include a Wi-Fi 802.11g module, one antenna for it, flopppy and ATA133 cables, 4 SATA cables, 1 SATA power adapter, 1 HDMI_SPDIF cable, and driver and software CDs.