so anyone here using that asrock 939 dual mobo??

hairball

and if so, how's it performing??

duridian

I've got the Asrock 939DualSata2. I'm very happy with it. For the money it's a great performer and I find it very stable. It suited my needs perfectly as I already had an AGP 6800GT which I wanted to use in the A64 rig I was building, but liked having the option to use a PCI-E card at a later time if I wished to upgrade the graphics.
Here are the specs of my Athlon 64 based rig containg the Asrock board:
Athlon64 3500 Venice, Asrock 939DualSata2, 1GB (2x512) Adata DDR400(CAS 2.5) with Nexus copper heatspreaders, 2 x 74GB WD Raptors in RAID0, 1 x WD Caviar SE 250GB IDE, Galaxy Glacier 6800GT AGP (stock speed is 370MHz instead of 350MHz, comes with Arctic cooler as standard), SB Audigy ZS Platinum, NEC 3520A DVDRW, Tagan TG480-U22 480W ATX2.0 PSU.

Super PI results:


3Dmark 05 results:


If, like me, you have no plans to go SLI then I would definitely recommend that you consider this ULI chipset motherboard. It may not be quite as fast, but it is not too far off the Nforce4 boards in performance, and costs much less. It also has a 'future cpu' slot; meaning when Socket M2 cpus arrive next year, you can get an adapter card which allows this newer type of CPU to work on this board as well, although I must admit the Socket M2 card plugging in like any other AGP or PCI card - ie. perpendicular to the motherboard - would limit the size of cpu heatsink somewhat. But anyway I would definitely give the motherboard a thumbs up.

hairball

Thanks for that man...even tho I'm not wanting to get caught up in that 'should I....shouldn't I' frame of mind about which way to go with mobo/cpu/gfx, I still find myself doing it anyways....but that clears a lot up for me, I like the future expansion slot idea as well, pity other makers don't look like they have it in their plans to follow suit, but thanks again for the help,

much appreciated

duridian

One other thing I probably should mention, is that there are just 2 SATA connectors on the RAID capable controller, and and a single SATA connector on the secondary controller. There are the usual 2 non RAID parallel ATA connectors (IDE). So it is a little bit limited in this department if you want to have a lot of hard drives, but the 2 in RAID would be adequate for most people's needs.

hairball

I don't feel the need to have more than 2 sata 300s at the mo tbh

BadCharlie

duridian wrote:

One other thing I probably should mention, is that there are just 2 SATA connectors on the RAID capable controller, and and a single SATA connector on the secondary controller. There are the usual 2 non RAID parallel ATA connectors (IDE). So it is a little bit limited in this department if you want to have a lot of hard drives, but the 2 in RAID would be adequate for most people's needs.

Could you give me a link to that motherboard ?
And are you saying that you can use a AGP and a PCI-E card in this motherboard of yours ?

hairball

here ya go:)

http://www.asrock.com/product/product_939Dual-SATA2.htm

BadCharlie

Thanks for that.
That anser's my question. So i could get that motherboard and use my old 6800GT card in it even though its AGP. Where did you buy the motherboard is my next question ?

hairball

I'm in denmark man, so I actually have a choice of about 15 different distributors....but I reckon komplett or someone like that will have it

BadCharlie

Dabs do it if i wanted to get it. Looks good and i could go 64bit and not have to get a new video card .

Is it any good for overclocking ?

hairball

not sure man I didn't end up going with it at the end...reviews I've read put it at around 5percent down on nforce4 boards performance wise...I ended up ordering a dfi lan party nf4 sli dr instead

SouperComputer

sweet board. AGP & PCI-E

duridian

For those looking for places selling this board:
FX Systems is where I got mine.
Tekheads have it for a fiver sterling less but their carriage is a lot dearer than FX Systems.

I've run my Venice 3500(2.2GHz) at stock nearly all of the time but I did try overclocking just to see and it went to 2.5GHz without any hassle, didn't push it beyond that but I'd say it would probably go another 100MHz at least. I am using a Zalman CNPS7000AlCu on the chip.