ASRock 939Dual-SATA2: First Retail ULi PCIe/AGP
by Wesley Fink on September 7, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
Almost everyone likes a story where the little guy wins - David beats Goliath. The little guy comes up with a unique and useful product or tops the Performance charts with a new chipset. Certainly, the ULi M1695/M1567 is just such a success story.Many buyers were begging for a PCIe board that would also support AGP, without compromise. Lots of companies tried and the market ended up with a lot of compromised solutions that didn't catch on. It took ULi to finally build the chipset that made top-performing AGP on a PCIe board a reality.
More than that, the ULi M1695/M1567 chipset does not need to apologize to any other chipset in its performance. The ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 shows a retail product that is as good, or even better, than the ULi Reference Boards that excited those sites that actually bothered to look at the ULi chipset with an open mind.
The ASRock is clearly a value board, designed to sell for a low price, but even so, it provides all the features, including SATA2 with NCQ, that you would expect on an up-to-date A64 motherboard. The ASRock is by no means perfect. The layout will be a pain for some, the cold boot issues are annoying, LAN is 10/100 and not Gigabit, and there are no Firewire ports. But the ASRock does so much, so well that it is easy to forgive the warts when you consider the selling price. We sincerely hope that ASRock will invest a bit more time in refining the 939Dual-SATA2. With a refined BIOS and expanded memory voltage adjustments, this board could be a monster hit for ASRock. It will likely sell very well regardless, as many will also notice the slot for a future M2 expansion board.
UPDATE: ASRock has released BIOS 1.20 dated 9/02/05 which can be downloaded from their web site. Version 1.20 fixed the cold boot problems we experienced.
We like the ASRock and its implementation of the ULi chipset. It is an easy board to recommend - especially in the value and mid-range segments. We are still looking, however, for the ULi chipset from Abit or Gigabyte or Albatron or DFI - or even ASUS - that will really squeeze everything possible from the ULi chipset. Hopefully, such a board is just around the corner.
For now, if you have a top AGP video card that you are not ready to replace, then get an ASRock 939Dual - you will not be disappointed in performance and you can add PCIe whenever. Even if you don't care about AGP, the PCIe performance of the ASRock will not disappoint. ULi has brought a capable, competitive chipset to the AMD Socket 939 market. It is a fully competitive choice for any buyer, a must for AGP owners, and more is on the way from ULi. The ASRock is a very good value board and we are looking forward to what can be done with this chipset on a board aimed at the enthusiast.
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tayhimself - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
What about SATA, USB, sound, and ethernet performance. This seems like an incomplete review to me. I find these side performance issues are becoming more and more important. The RS480 for example has lousy SATA and USB performance which would rule it out for some who use those heavily.Wesley Fink - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
We covered ULi SATA, USB, IDE, and other peripheral performance in our review of the 2nd ULi cReference Board at http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2489">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2489. It seemed redundant to test features in the chipset again or external chips that we have just benchmarked. The ULI IDE and SATA performance were top-notch, and the USB was competetive (much better than ATI). Please refer to the ULi review for chipset benchmarks.We did not test the JMicron SATA2 3Gb performance since we have not yet standardized on a 3Gb test platform. The Holy Grail at AnandTech is that a benchmark by itself is an advertisement - it takes 2 or more benchmarks compared for a review. AnandTech has been working on a chipset performance comparison for storage, and you will soon see comparison benchmarks for SATA2 performance in addition to SATA1.
OvErHeAtInG - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
AFter rereading the review of the ULi ref board rev 2, I did notice that the ULi reference board had used the Realtek ALC655, and this board (ASRock) lists the ALC850. I don't really know much about this topic, but based on the review of the reference board I would be a little bit worried about the CPU utilization of the ALC850? This is frankly critical to budget gamers I think. One doesn't want to use the on board audio if it will use 30% CPU. Can you enlighten me Wesley?Tnx
tayhimself - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
Thanks for this reply and the others. Good to see the reviewers checking comments. Props!yacoub - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
If this is priced equivalent and not more (and we know that won't be the case) then it might be worthwhile. If it costs $50-100 more, it would be no better than selling one's current AGP gpu and picking up a PCI-I gpu and ignoring any issues that might come from this freaky PCI-E/AGP/M2 board. :)bhtooefr - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
It's $68 at Newegg.Newegg's cheapest Socket 939 PCIe (RS480 in this case) mobo is $66, and it's an ECS (ECS is on my blacklist).
The cheapest non-ECS board that has Socket 939 and PCIe is this, and the nearest board in that class (non-ECS, S939, PCIe) is $75.
Also, keep in mind, in performance, it keeps up with the big dogs. So, let's make it RS480s and NF4Us as the competition. Now, you're talking $80 for a Biostar NF4U, $84 for a Jetway RS480 (again, the ECS board is an RS480...)
So, it's DEFINITELY worth it.
BTW, this can run dual-GPU (not SLI). Wanted to run four heads, with two 3D render jobs running at once? This is the board to get. (Heck, ULi calls it "triple graphics technology", because of good ol' PCI GPUs. For that matter, there's PCIe 1x GPUs...)
Powermoloch - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
This is marvelous :) !! for 68 $?? AsRock my be crazy by setting that price range. In any case, This is great for me and users who are in a similar situation, those who didn't want to blow wads of cash on another high end pci-e card for an upgrade. This is great news, kudos to everyone who made the product and a great review too from anandtech.comSynthDude2001 - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
I don't know what to say other than "awesome". It's been a long time in coming, but finally there's a solution out there for all of us high-end AGP owners that don't want to ditch last year's $350 video card just yet. ASRock has also already released one new BIOS version since the board was introduced, so I'm not worried about small issues.Unless another manufacturer comes out with a board based on this chipset/southbridge within the next month or two, this will be the board I buy to finally move into the Athlon 64 world. For $65, you can't really go wrong.
Calin - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
At its time, I bought a SIS735 board (with RAM support of up to PC133 and PC-3200, two memory slots for each). This looks like the new "transition" board to have :)flatblastard - Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - link
"It will likely sell very well regardless, as many will also notice the slot for a future M2 expansion board.".....A slot that likely will never be populated and even more likely not to be supported by Asrock in the future. But hey, if it helps sell a few thousand more mobo's, more power to them.