Package and Contents of the P45R2000-WiFi

First off, we'll start with the package and contents of the top board here; the P45R2000-WiFi. This is the mainstream board from ASRock that is packed with features to the hilt. The box that the board is shipped in is of the standard size for the ATX motherboards; no over the top packaging. The company logo and the model number dominate the front with some fancy art work.

On the back of the box there is a lot of fancy marketing info on the boards' features including the benefits of PCI Express 2.0 as well as the WiFi controller. One thing that is missing is a colour photo of the board. For this level of manufacturing and marketing that ASRock are trying to push into, at least a small colour picture of the product would be nice. Bit disappointed here.

One thing that didn't disappoint was the documentation and software bundle that came with the board. In the P45R2000 series box, you get two user manuals. One of them is for the board itself with a lot of useful setup data, info on the BIOS as well as the driver and software installation.

The second manual is for the WiFi card and gives you setup instructions for the software app that is included. The Driver DVD contains XP and Vista Drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit variations, but again, no Linux support. This is very disappointing for alternate OS users who have to go and chase down drivers.

Moving along to the cables supplied, there are a total of four SATA data cables. While the board does support six, if you want to use them all you will have to go and get two extra cables from a retailer, but it's still nice to see at least four included. However, the power cable side was skimped on. There's only one Molex to SATA power converter included, so you'd better hope your PSU can support more than one drive. Lastly, there are the ribbon cables and these are a single FDD cable that supports one drive and an IDE cable supporting two drives.

Last on the agenda is the WiFi add-on card. This card is actually USB powered, so if you want to use it, one of the three extra USB headers is sacrificed. The card contains a Realtek USB WiFi controller chip that supports the 802.11b/g wireless networking protocol; no WiMAX yet.