ASRock 939 Dual-SATA2 Motherboard

This is an entry-level board. Its most noticeable feature

is the support provided for AMD's upcoming processors based on the Socket M2

or AM2, expected to hit the market sometime this year. The board has a M2940

riser slot to support the new processor(s). The motherboard supports all

currently available AMD 64 bit series 939 pin processors. It's based on the

Uli M1695/M1567 chipset. The board has 4 DIMMs, which support up to 4 GB DDR

RAM, two SATA I and one SATA II port. Plus, it has two IDE slots to retain

backward compatibility, one PCI-E x1, 3 PCI slots and a single PCI-E x16 slot.

The board even has an AGP 8x slot. It also has 6-channels onboard audio but no

onboard video. External connectivity includes 4 USB 2.0 ports. There's a

10/100 Mbps Ethernet port for network connectivity.

We tested the board with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

processor, 1 GB 400 RAM, 80 GB 7,200 rpm HDD and Windows XP PRO SP2. The scores

for BW and MCCW were 43.9 and 61.5, respectively, which are pretty good. Gaming

performance was tested using NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX 256 MB card, using 3Dmark

'05, UT 2004 and DOOM3. The scores obtained were 7427 3DMarks and 54.58 fps in

UT at 1024 x 768 resolution and 76.3 fps for DOOM3 at 1280 x 1024 resolution,

ultra quality. These are good scores. On the overclocking front, the board

let's you tweak your processor's speed, voltage etc.

Bottom Line: Overall,

it's a good board. But being an entry-level one, we wish it also had onboard

graphics. The good thing is that if you're upgrading, then you could use your

old AGP card and not spend extra on a graphics card.

Abe Kurian