Introduction

You received your economic stimulus check a while back. You really didn't quite understand the purpose for it, but hey, no one is going to turn down free cash..especially when it's from ol' Uncle Sam, who has been the willing recipient of your money for what seems like forever. It looked like for a while your wife was trying to stimulate you to the poorhouse, but ends up there is some left over, and between that and your rainy-day fund, you will finally be able to retire that old AM2 X2 rig you've had a little too long and build yourself a sparkling new rig. Sure, it will definitely be a budget-priced rig, but a new rig is a new rig.

It is really a good time to build a rig, with some really incredible deals on the last generation of everything. You end up choosing Intel, and decide on the E8400. It was a hard choice between the 8800GT, the 9600GT, and the HD 3870, but you think you've made the best choice. You do your homework, and feel that Intel's new P45 chipset will give you the best performance for your other choices.

But, the big decision, which memory platform? You already have a 4GB DDR2 kit, it's kind of old, but still quite serviceable, and you can put the old 2GB kit back into the 939 rig for the kids. Using the DDR2 4GB kit on the new rig for a while would really help you afford the power supply you are looking at, but you really hate to lock yourself into DDR2 for the next few years, knowing that sooner or later DDR2 will die and DDR3 prices will really start falling.and you know you won't be able to afford both memory and a motherboard for a long time. What to do, what to do?

Our good friends at ASRock feel your pain. Building practical solutions for tough problems into motherboards is what they are best known for, and they have just released what may be the answer to your problems, an Intel P45 board capable of running both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. This isn't a new idea, a few companies did the same thing with the P35 last year. Most attempts were less than awesome, but ASRock's board was clearly the best attempt. With this experience under their belts, ASRock has released the P45R2000-Wifi. Will it be the solution for those wanting a gradual crossover from DDR2 to DDR3? Keep reading to see!

Packaging

The P45R2000-WiFi comes in the typical box that ASRock packages all of their motherboards in. The front is covered with features, and the rear of the box describes a few features in detail.

Inside the box, the bundle is on top of a cardboard divider, with the board inside a static-free sleeve underneath.