ASRock K10N78hSLI-WiFi Motherboard

Product: ASRock K10N78hSLI-WiFi Motherboard
Provided By: ASRock
Price: ~$105 CAD Online

Introduction:

A few weeks ago we took at a look at the first ASRock board to cross our bench and while that board was mostly a winner, there is always room for improvement.  Today we follow up with the ASRock K10N78hSLI-WiFi motherboard for the AMD platform, and while you may get excited by the "78" in the model number, I can assure you that this is no Tri-SLI capable board.  In fact there is only a single PCIe 16x slot.  Keep on reading to find out more about this unit.

Closed Box

Open Box

First Look & Impressions:

Much like every other ASRock board on the market, the packaging is quite minimalistic in terms of size and flash.  There is nothing really catchy about the box, and it is about half as thick as the box from a Gigabyte DX6 board.  Surprisingly, ASRock has still managed to cram a lot of goodies in the box to add value to this already value-priced motherboard.

Hardware Bundle

Cable Bundle

The ASRock K10N78hSLI-WiFi comes with an add-on WiFi module that plugs into some motherboard headers and this little is pictured below.  It's not really all that special in and of itself, but the software allows this motherboard to act either as a wireless client or a wireless access point.  This is a pretty handy feature to have around if you don't currently have an existing wireless network and some people come over with a laptop, Wii, or any other 802.11b/g device.

WiFi Card

Overall, the bundle is quite inclusive.  In the box you get an IDE cable, floppy cable, four SATA cables, audio cable and the WiFi antenna as well as the I/O shield for this board, Vista and Windows XP driver CDs, a manual, and a PCI slot cover for the WiFi card.  It doesn't have quite as many SATA cables as headers and there are no extra USB-PCI cables, but you can't have everything in a value bundle I guess.