ASRock 939Dual-SATA2

ASRock is known for making budget products, and as such, you wouldn't expect to see them in the pages of CPC; even the company's website rather humbly claims that it looks best at 800 x 600. Those of you with massive 1,600 x 1,200 screens might need a magnifying glass to navigate around it. However, it's worth the effort, because ASRock has a gem on its hands, in the square, ATX-regulated shape of its 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard.

The 939Dual-SATA2's name makes the next line of explanation dangerously unnecessary, but just so we're clear: it's a Socket 939 motherboard, with S-ATA II support and dual capabilities. The latter claim deserves a fuller description though. Not only is the 939Dual ready to support Athlon 64 X2 CPUs out of the box, it also features dual graphics slots. It isn't an SLI or CrossFire board though; it has both a 16x PCI-E slot and an AGP 8x slot, a combination we've never seen before. This means that if you own an aging CPU, such as an Athlon XP, but have a respectable AGP graphics card, such as a GeForce 6800 GT, that you're reluctant to junk, then the 939Dual is the perfect upgrade option. You can get a new, technologically advanced CPU such as an Athlon 64, and keep your current graphics card until you can afford, or are tempted by, a new PCI-E card.

It isn't just the AGP slot that's accommodating for those migrating from older systems. The ATX power connector on the 939Dual is of the 20-pin variety, so you don't need to buy a new PSU, although this might still be a good idea, especially if you buy a dual-core CPU.

Given that ATi and Nvidia are both concentrating on PCI-E graphics cards and motherboard chipsets, and Intel obviously doesn't make AMD chipsets, you may be wondering whose silicon is powering the 939Dual.

Underneath the spiky silver heatsink, you'll find the M1695 Northbridge at the heart of the action, and it's made by a firm called ULi. Describing itself as 'young in history, but rich in capability', which is a far pithier and briefer phrase than those used by many Taiwanese tech firms, ULi is an independent subsidiary of ALi, which is itself a spin-off from Acer.

The M1695 Northbridge is paired with the M1567 Southbridge, and it's this combination that enables the board to run both AGP and PCI-E graphics cards. You can also run cards in both slots simultaneously for a multimonitor setup. As well as the AGP 8x slot and the 16x PCI-E slot, there's also a 1x PCI-E slot and three PCI slots on the board. Compared with some high-end boards, there aren't that many S-ATA ports, and of the three present, only one supports S-ATA II. The two EIDE channels are again handy if you're upgrading older kit. The only problem with the PCB layout is that the 1x PCI-E slot is far too close to the 16x PCI-E slot; even a single-slot graphics card renders the 1x PCI-E slot virtually useless. Other than that, the ports are sensibly placed and labelled. There's no need to fiddle with jumpers to alternate between AGP and PCI-E graphics slots, so upgrading from one to the other will primarily be a pecuniary issue. As the 939Dual supports both AGP and PCI-E natively, you'll only need to quickly reinstall the graphics driver - Windows XP doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

One of the reasons that things are a bit crowded around the 16x PCI-E slot is the other expansion slot above it, the intriguingly named Future CPU Port, which, in the Ronseal tradition, does exactly what it says on the tin. Much like the ECS PF88 Extreme with its SIMA card, according to the 939Dual's manual, you can plug in an expansion board with a Socket 940 mount on it. We can't see this being incredibly useful, unless you have a very early 940-pin Athlon 64 FX, but it means that it will be possible to fit an AMD M2 socket-type CPU to the 939Dual in the future. This will be dependent on ASRock making the right part, however.

ASRock's budget heritage is evident when it comes to the rest of the board's features: there's no FireWire, on-board audio comes in the shape of basic 8-channel AC97, and the LAN port is of the 10/100 variety.

However, considering the 939Dual costs just £46.38, you'll probably have money left over to upgrade if any of these features are important to you.

For people who are still worried that such a cut-price, no-name board might be hiding something, it's worth stating that the 939Dual covers the obvious technical bases: you still get four DIMM sockets, and the Athlon 64's integrated memory controller means that the board can run the memory in dual-channel mode.

PERFORMANCE

We tested the 939Dual using our standard Athlon 64 test kit, and it's fair to say that, out of the box, it isn't exactly impressive. Its results were consistently slower than what we've come to expect from our Athlon 64 X2 4200+ when slotted into an nForce4 motherboard. Overall, the 939Dual scored 1.28 in our 2D benchmarks, compared to the ECS KN1 SLI's 1.30 and the 1.31 of the Sapphire Pure Innovation. Considering that Athlon 64 CPUs have an integrated memory controller, such a difference is strange.

Using the Memory Bandwidth test of SiSoftware Sandra 2005, we found that the 939Dual's memory bandwidth was much lower than that of an nForce4 board, so we headed to the BIOS and soon found the culprit: the Command Rate's default auto setting was 2T. This setting controls how fast the memory controller issues commands, and most high-end boards will default to the more aggressive 1T when they detect RAM that will work with it.

The Corsair XMS4400C25 RAM that we use has no problem with the 1T setting, and when we forced it in the BIOS, the 939Dual performed as well as any nForce4 board.

As the 939Dual is a budget board, we weren't expecting much from the BIOS, but it's clearly laid out, and the options you need are easy to find. There's a PCI-E lock and the ability to adjust the multiplier of your CPU, but voltage options are limited. The RAM voltage options are woolly, being either normal or high. With our Athlon 64 X2 4200+, the maximum CPU voltage available was a weak 1.35V, which is the CPU's default. With the multiplier at its minimum setting of 4x, the maximum FSB it could hit was 250MHz, which is much lower than most nForce4 boards. There's still some headroom, though, and with the multiplier at default, it was able to benchmark with a 220MHz FSB.

In Far Cry, the 939Dual acquitted itself well, scoring 66fps with a PCI-E GeForce 6800 GT at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF. We then ran the same test with an AGP GeForce 6800 GT, and got exactly the same score, showing that, at the moment, PCI-E might just be a giant conspiracy to get us all to upgrade; but thanks to the 939Dual, those who don't upgrade won't suffer.

CONCLUSION

Looking at the PCI-E and AGP benchmarks of the 939Dual, a cynic, well aware of the way technical evolution almost instantly makes everything obsolete, might conclude that computers are little more than a great big scheme to relieve people of their money. This is the cynic's view, though, and the 939Dual is a great product that shows it's possible to have the benefits of new technology, such as a dual-core CPU, without having to sacrifice older, worthwhile pieces of kit, such as an AGP graphics card.

Alongside the motherboards we usually review, with their flashy lights, garish colour schemes and heady prices, the 939Dual looks a little dowdy. It's cheap and doesn't have much in the way of brand cachet, but what it does have in spades is technical ability, and it deserves your consideration.