ASRock 939Dual Motherboard

The ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 is one of the first retail boards using ULi’s M1695 chipset, an alternative to the nVidia nForce solution. This board is unusual in that it features both AGP 8x and PCI-E x16 expansion slots without sacrificing performance and also comes in at cheaper than the nVidia alternative.

Along with the AGP and PCI-E x16 interfaces, the board features a PCI-E x1 slot and 3 standard PCI slots which should be sufficient for most expansions. Interestingly there is another slot labeled “future CPU port” which from the looks of it, might be able to add a card in that can take a different CPU.

ASRock does a reasonable job with the layout of the 939Dual although there could’ve been some extra room around the CPU socket as the Northbridge with its heatsink sits too close to it. Four memory sockets are located to the right of the CPU socket while the two power connectors are one the left.

Two IDE connectors along with three SATA connectors are located towards the bottom of the board of the board which is fine as it makes them close to the drives, however, we feel that the floppy connector should’ve been moved upwards. Along with the floppy connector, ASRock places the USB and audio headers which is also a good place. Along with the expansion card slots, the ASRock board features three SATA connectors, two standard SATA1 ports and one SATA2 port cabable of up to 3.0Gb/s transfer speeds. Extra features on the board consist of 8 channel on-board audio and a 10/100 on-board NIC, both using Realtek controllers.

ASRock seem to have put a fair bit of thought into the BIOS on this board, as it contains all the standard features plus many others that you would only expect to see on a performance board. Overclocking with the ASRock wasn’t quite up to par with the nForce 4 boards but stability in general was excellent.

This board performed well in benchmarks as well, considering its price. It was put up against two of the best S939 boards available, DFI’s Lanparty NF4 offering and Abits Fatal1ty board, and managed to hold its own in the majority of benchmarks, being only slightly slower than the more expensive boards.

To sum it up, the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 is a decent enough board. It has all the features you would expect of a S939 board nowadays and is only slightly slower than the nForce4 boards. Where it stands out though is for people wishing to upgrade to S939, who still wish to keep their AGP graphics card. For them, this board is just what is needed on the market.

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