ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2 Motherboard Review :: Layout and Bundle

The layout of the board is interesting. The 20-pin ATX power connector is above the CPU Socket. This positioning means the cable doesn't have to snake across the board from the power supply, but can be routed directly from the PSU. The 4-pin power connector is placed in the same area, but is in a good position.

The placement of the memory below the CPU is excellent. At this position, a video card in either the PCI Express x16 slot or AGP8x slot does not block the memory slots. I prefer boards like this one that don't overlap the video card, as cards like the 7800GTX are already blocking two or even three DIMMs on some boards.

The floppy drive connector is not in an optimal position. On a full-tower case, I had to look around for a longer floppy drive cable than the motherboard comes with to reach. Further, the cable has to snake around my 7800GTX and other add-in cards when routed from the case to the connector.

ASRock uses the ULI M1695 North Bridge and the ULI M1567 South Bridge on this motherboard. On the North Bridge, ASRock includes a passive heat sink to cool the chip. The South Bridge has another heat sink with the ASRock logo for cooling. The motherboard chipset supports up to 8 USB 2.0 devices via the additional 2 headers but no additional USB brackets are included in the bundle.

Bundle

• ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard
• Support CD
• Nortons Internet Security 2005
• Floppy Drive cable
• ATA100 cable
• 1x SATA data cable
• 1x SATA 1 to 1 power cable

The bundle on the ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2 motherboard is sparse and just enough to get you started. The inclusion of one SATA cable and one IDE cable is rather mediocre. I much prefer motherboard manufacturers to include the same number of cables as the included ports as not everyone has the extra SATA cables that two or more hard drives would require.

Nortons Internet Security 2005 is a suite of programs designed to protect your computer. IS 2005 consists of Norton AntiVirus, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Privacy Control, Norton Parental Control and Norton AntiSpam. NAV is my second choice for antivirus software behind Panda's and Norton's Personal Firewall controls your network from intrusions.

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