ecktt
10-14-2006, 01:12 PM
What I reviewed?
Well this eh so much of a review as it is my experience of the board and it was relatively brief. The ASRock 939Dual-VSTA Socket 939 ULi M1695 ATX AMD Motherboard retails for just under 70USD and has 2 special features that many people find very useful. It has both native PCI-E and AGP slots. Its also can upgrade to any CPU (AMD , Intel or "insert brand") via a daughter card and proprietary slot. Other than those features, this board is pretty lacking. It has 4 USB 2.0 in the back and 2 USB 2.0 headers on board (cable not included), C-media sound and the standard array of SATA, IDE and floppy connectors.
Here link to the manufacturer product page.
http://www.asrock.com/product/939Dual-VSTA.htm
http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/939Dual-VSTA.jpg
When working with this board, it was equipped with a ATI 9600PRO 256 AIW, 512 CAS 3 PC3200 RAM, a pair of Western digital 80 GB 16 MB cache 7200 rpm IDE drives, NEC 3550a DVDRW, Lite-on 40x12x48 CDRW, AMD X2 3800 with stock heat sink and CooLMax "SLI" CXI-500B ATX v2.01 500W Power Supply.
What I didn't like about this board?
The ATX power connector was only 20 Pin while most other boards have gone to the newer 24 Pin standard. This might be good if you wanted to use that PSU you bought 6 years ago but odds are that PSU eh going to cut the mustard in this case. What this means is that a 20+4 ATX connector will have to be used and the +4 part will be dangling with its only purpose in life to be unsightly. The ATX connector is to the let of the CPU and power regulators, therefore it blocks air flows and makes for and unsightly install. No gigabit LAN! The makers of this board must live in the dark ages where porn files are still less that 10KB. The layout overall seem a bit clustered. The board only supports 1 floppy. Many find this a none issue but the person who I got this board for has 2 (3 1/2" and 5 1/4"). The BIOS is lacking in the Over Clocking department. It doesn’t even give the CPU supported DDR500 option.
What I did like about this board?
The price is great. At under 70usd, this board is a steal. Why a steal? It’s stable. I have never been a big fan of AMD platform stability but this board is making me think twice. How stable is it? I ran 2 instance of Prime 95 (one on each core of an X2 3800) while looping 3Dmark2005 for about a day. Why did I do that? Because I over clocked the CPU to 2.8 GHz form 2.0 GHz. All I did was reduce the memory speed to DDR266 (the owner only had a single stick of 512 MarkVision, which wasn't the best for OCing) and reduced the multiplier to 8. If people didn't do the math, that’s a 350 cpu bus speed. I’ve not seen that on ANY boards for K8 make that bus speed, even with exotic cooling setups. What’s even more amazing is that no voltage bump was require and there was no control in the bios of the HT multiplier. Using my GSkill 2 GB Kit which I know can do CAS 2 DDR500, I managed a 356MHz fsb using CAS 3 DDR 333 setting for the memory.
Who would want this board?
If you building a new computer, definitely not you. Intel new offerings make it a much better buy and DDR2 is a little more future proof, though DDR3 is suppose to hit next year. But if you're upgrading in small steps and want to keep that video card and memory you bought 2 years ago and still get the job done, this is definitely the way. Hell if I had know this board would kick so much ass, I would have told people to buy this board over the rest of the socket 939 offerings.
What could be better?
The on board Audio is just good enough to lessen to music and to play a few games. I suppose they could have done better. The LAN port is 100MB full duplex which is kind of slow but in its defence, it had 93% sustained throughput that is the highest I've seen for any 10/100 NIC ever. The lay out off the board could have been better. The power regulators could have had some kind of heat sink as well, though didn't seem to impact the stability or overclocking ability. A PCI-E 4 slot would have be great instead of the PCI-E 1.
Conclusion.
This cheap gem has shocked the hell out of me. Its stability, OCing ability and versatility are second to none for AMD IMHO. Its short comings are pretty secondary since they apply to the none essential aspects of the board operation but the board is so dam good, it’s easy to ignore the hiccups. I'm sure anyone on a tight budget could mod this board witha little extra cooling and get even more impressive overclocking results than i did.
Well this eh so much of a review as it is my experience of the board and it was relatively brief. The ASRock 939Dual-VSTA Socket 939 ULi M1695 ATX AMD Motherboard retails for just under 70USD and has 2 special features that many people find very useful. It has both native PCI-E and AGP slots. Its also can upgrade to any CPU (AMD , Intel or "insert brand") via a daughter card and proprietary slot. Other than those features, this board is pretty lacking. It has 4 USB 2.0 in the back and 2 USB 2.0 headers on board (cable not included), C-media sound and the standard array of SATA, IDE and floppy connectors.
Here link to the manufacturer product page.
http://www.asrock.com/product/939Dual-VSTA.htm
http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/939Dual-VSTA.jpg
When working with this board, it was equipped with a ATI 9600PRO 256 AIW, 512 CAS 3 PC3200 RAM, a pair of Western digital 80 GB 16 MB cache 7200 rpm IDE drives, NEC 3550a DVDRW, Lite-on 40x12x48 CDRW, AMD X2 3800 with stock heat sink and CooLMax "SLI" CXI-500B ATX v2.01 500W Power Supply.
What I didn't like about this board?
The ATX power connector was only 20 Pin while most other boards have gone to the newer 24 Pin standard. This might be good if you wanted to use that PSU you bought 6 years ago but odds are that PSU eh going to cut the mustard in this case. What this means is that a 20+4 ATX connector will have to be used and the +4 part will be dangling with its only purpose in life to be unsightly. The ATX connector is to the let of the CPU and power regulators, therefore it blocks air flows and makes for and unsightly install. No gigabit LAN! The makers of this board must live in the dark ages where porn files are still less that 10KB. The layout overall seem a bit clustered. The board only supports 1 floppy. Many find this a none issue but the person who I got this board for has 2 (3 1/2" and 5 1/4"). The BIOS is lacking in the Over Clocking department. It doesn’t even give the CPU supported DDR500 option.
What I did like about this board?
The price is great. At under 70usd, this board is a steal. Why a steal? It’s stable. I have never been a big fan of AMD platform stability but this board is making me think twice. How stable is it? I ran 2 instance of Prime 95 (one on each core of an X2 3800) while looping 3Dmark2005 for about a day. Why did I do that? Because I over clocked the CPU to 2.8 GHz form 2.0 GHz. All I did was reduce the memory speed to DDR266 (the owner only had a single stick of 512 MarkVision, which wasn't the best for OCing) and reduced the multiplier to 8. If people didn't do the math, that’s a 350 cpu bus speed. I’ve not seen that on ANY boards for K8 make that bus speed, even with exotic cooling setups. What’s even more amazing is that no voltage bump was require and there was no control in the bios of the HT multiplier. Using my GSkill 2 GB Kit which I know can do CAS 2 DDR500, I managed a 356MHz fsb using CAS 3 DDR 333 setting for the memory.
Who would want this board?
If you building a new computer, definitely not you. Intel new offerings make it a much better buy and DDR2 is a little more future proof, though DDR3 is suppose to hit next year. But if you're upgrading in small steps and want to keep that video card and memory you bought 2 years ago and still get the job done, this is definitely the way. Hell if I had know this board would kick so much ass, I would have told people to buy this board over the rest of the socket 939 offerings.
What could be better?
The on board Audio is just good enough to lessen to music and to play a few games. I suppose they could have done better. The LAN port is 100MB full duplex which is kind of slow but in its defence, it had 93% sustained throughput that is the highest I've seen for any 10/100 NIC ever. The lay out off the board could have been better. The power regulators could have had some kind of heat sink as well, though didn't seem to impact the stability or overclocking ability. A PCI-E 4 slot would have be great instead of the PCI-E 1.
Conclusion.
This cheap gem has shocked the hell out of me. Its stability, OCing ability and versatility are second to none for AMD IMHO. Its short comings are pretty secondary since they apply to the none essential aspects of the board operation but the board is so dam good, it’s easy to ignore the hiccups. I'm sure anyone on a tight budget could mod this board witha little extra cooling and get even more impressive overclocking results than i did.