ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2 Motherboard Review :: Setup and BIOS

Setup of the 939Dual-SATA2 board was a piece of cake and went without incident. After unpacking the board from the box, I mounted the board on our test station, installed the memory, CPU, video cards, and hard drives and booted the computer. POST on first install is always a good thing when installing a motherboard. The board went through stability testing and burn in tests without problem.

AGP Card

Overclock

I was able to overclock the board to a 215MHz FSB. That may not seem like much, but the 4000+ CPU from AMD we use for standard testing is limiting the overclock, as most boards we test don't overclock very well with the CPU. Stability with this overclock was excellent, running all the benchmarks without a crash.

In testing the board, I decided to fire up my trusty old 5900 Ultra, the last AGP video card we have in our test labs. Once I inserted the video card into the AGP8x slot, I set the Primary Display Adapter in the BIOS setup to AGP. Upon a further reboot, I installed the latest Forceware WHQL drivers for NVIDIA cards and setup was complete. First thing I did was run a benchmark of 3DMark05 to verify that the card operated correctly. The card performed like a charm and AGP on this board works as advertised.

BIOS

The BIOS on the board is an American Megatrends BIOS that seems to be popular among some people. The BIOS provides a host of options and overclocking features. The CPU can be overclocked with the CPU/PCIe Frequency in sync or async. You can set the processor multiplier from x8 to x23, assuming you have an unlocked CPU. Processor Voltage can be changed from 1.550V-1.175V in 0.025V increments. Memory can by run 200MHz, 166MHz or 133MHz. DRAM settings are robust as well. One nice touch on the board is the ability to set NB/SB HTT frequencies.

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