ASRock 939Dual-SATA2

Got the board along with an X2 3800+...

Been running stable for more than 24 hours... Performance generally is good but I am surpised not to see more of a difference in gaming going from an Athlon XP, I figured my X800XT PE was not the bottleneck at all. Multitasking is awesome with this X2 for sure. Haven't tried the overclocking options yet... I seem to already have the 1.2 bios though.
 
Great thread, Lots of great info. Nice to know it is shipping with the 1.20 BIOS
The things holding me back from buying this board today are:
With my 850XT in the AGP slot there are NO available PCI slots.
Stupid question, will a PCI card work in the PCIe slot?

Other thing is that I have read enough posts about people running this board noticing a performance drop using AGP cards.
Some people say they have switched to this board from machines with slower CPUs and claimed a performance decrease.

Granted there is not much out there on this MB but I would hate to go through the expense of upgrading only to see performance worsen.

Anybody here running this board with their old AGP cards have before and after 3dmarks or any benches showing a difference with this board?
 
well I have some benches but they aren't exactly scientific. I have a different cpu now so the score will be off. I can list the details though. I just ran 3dmark03. don't have 05 installed yet. This system (system A) is the dual sata with a 3500+ oc'd to 2.48ghz, with a pny 6800gt the other system (system B) is a MSI K8T-Neo2 with a 3000+ oc'd to 2.25ghz with the same pny 6800 gt.

Overall System A 3dmark 12438 CPU 847
GT1 - Wings of Fury 283.9 fps

GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 103.7 fps

GT3 - Troll's Lair 82.1 fps

GT4 - Mother Nature 68.8 fps

Overall system B 3dmark 11335 CPU 993
Game Tests
GT1 - Wings of Fury 297.6 fps

GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 89.8 fps

GT3 - Troll's Lair 74.4 fps

GT4 - Mother Nature 60.4 fps


As you can see some interesting results, Take note that the system B cpu was oc'd with 250 fsb, while A was oc'd with only 225fsb, I'm still working on getting it up to there.
Feel free to compare those system A marks with other 3500+ systems and make your own conclusions
 
Wow, great job BigBadGreen, the results are very interesting.

They also seem to confirm the kind of things I have been reading about this board.
Why on earth your CPU score would be lower with the 3500 is a mystery. Is it possible some other BIOS setting is not optimized?
 
I'm still looking into the cpu thing. It could be a lot of things actually. My guess is that the fsb has a lot to do with it. with 250fsb the cpu is getting a lot more info in and out. Other things could be the north and south bridges and their speed in connection with the cpu. I have barely tapped into the settings in the bios of this board. I'm sure with some fine tuning and some more overclocking things will settle out how they should be.

I have also been experienceing things I don't like with the latest nvidia drivers. I've been getting some wierd glitches in guild wars. I went back to some older drivers and they dissapeared. those tests were with the latest drivers though. Also note though that the overall score was higher in with system A even though the cpu was lower, so in reguards to the speed of the gpu being effected by this board I would have to give that a no. only things different are the overclock, cpu, and the board. Memory, hard drives, psu, etc... are all the same as the MSI system.
 
The thing that concerns me most is that AGP performance in ALL cases with a faster CPU should be faster.

I am surprised that the reviews I have read don't test for this, they are all so used to doing reviews in a cookie cutter fashion they forgot the target audience for this board. AGP users planning an upgrade path along the 939 processors.
 
I plan on waiting to see what other companys do with this chipset. If its about the same performance as this board is showing I will proby pick on up. I mean come on $70 and it gives nForce 4 a run for its money with its first stage driver release. Thats awsome in my book.
 
I ordered a the 939 duallie from newegg this afternoon I'm excited to see what she can do. -Quimz out
 
QuimZ said:
I ordered a the 939 duallie from newegg this afternoon I'm excited to see what she can do. -Quimz out
Click to expand...

Nice. Let us know what you can squeeze out. And I like your sig ;)
 
smmakira said:
I plan on waiting to see what other companys do with this chipset. If its about the same performance as this board is showing I will proby pick on up. I mean come on $70 and it gives nForce 4 a run for its money with its first stage driver release. Thats awsome in my book.
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Yeah, Jetwat and Chaintech are supposed to be coming out with M1695 boards soon. I will wait and see if/when they do how they compare to this...
 
QuimZ said:
I ordered a the 939 duallie from newegg this afternoon I'm excited to see what she can do. -Quimz out
Click to expand...


You're going to want to get a conductive pen and do a vcore mod to the mobo if you plan to overclock... Max option on the board for vcore is 1.4. It's really easy to make it give you up to 1.55.
 
I've only spent a few hours with this board, currently running 3700+, 11X245 with 2X512 XBLK synchronous at 245 at 2.5/3/3/5 1T. It'll run stable at 11X250, but I have to either modify RAM timings or use 166 memory clock for stability at 11X250, which results in a memory bandwidth hit.

With my components, neither Vcore nor Vdimm mods are needed. I set Vdimm to 'high' (2.7V) and Vcore of 1.4V has been sufficient (1.425V and 1.45V available in BIOS).

Booted out of the box. No problems with my 9800Pro or any other devices.

Both chipset heatsinks had a sloppy application of white silicon compound. I'd suggest cleaning that off and applying some AS5 before installing the board. They do get hot.

I've only worked up the 11X and 10X CPU multipliers. I have problems going above 250MHz on 11X multiplier and above 270MHz on the 10X multiplier. Board ships with the 1.20 BIOS. I've used both the 1.20 and the ocwb1 BIOS, but I still have the same HTT/FSB ceilings with either. The ocwb1 BIOS has some changed defaults and apparently relaxed some hidden timings, as memory bandwidth is slightly less. The asrflash program works fine.

I ordered a Thermalright XP-90 and backplate, but it hasn't been delivered yet - and isn't really needed at the speeds I'm running. My CPU-loaded temps never exceed 50C with the fan/heatsink provided with AMD retail CPUs.

My only disappointment is with the FSB ceilings reported above - but I still have a 500MHz overclock with a $68 board. I have little to complain about.

Hope this helps!
 
HardUp4HardWare said:
Yeah, Jetwat and Chaintech are supposed to be coming out with M1695 boards soon. I will wait and see if/when they do how they compare to this...
Click to expand...

Any time frame on when these might be popping up?
 
Just got mine, should have a 3200+ Winny I got from the forums today as well.

Haven't OC'd in awhile but am moving from an Intel 3.2C. I was looking for a good upgrade path and really you can't ask for much more from this board.

Since it has both AGP & PCIe, I can keep my X800Pro VIVO with the unlocked pipes, and it has a socket for future M2 upgrades. Granted you'll be limited by the fact that you'll still have DDR when the M2 might run on DDR2 or DDR3, but think of the economics of this board.

I can get an X2 down the road, upgrade to PCIe when the next gen of video cards comes out, use SATAII when those drives are plentiful and then when M2 comes out get that CPU. Then eventually move the M2 and PCIe over to a native M2 board and get new RAM.

I wish more motherboards of this kind were out there, I have less time to spend tearing apart my system, but still like to make upgrades.

Hopefully I can push the Winchester to 3500+ speeds or so, we'll see.

Oh for the packaging I thought they did a good job for a budget board. If you're looking to upgrade this board + A64 is the way to go IMHO.
 
alienz said:
and it has a socket for future M2 upgrades. Granted you'll be limited by the fact that you'll still have DDR when the M2 might run on DDR2 or DDR3, but think of the economics of this board.
Click to expand...


The daughterboard will have a M2 socket AND dimm slots, probably two slots due to space limitations.
 
smmakira said:
Any time frame on when these might be popping up?
Click to expand...

Don't know. Hardly any info at all out there on these. I just know that they had shown some samples at some trade show.
I gotta think that someone else HAS to be working on m1695 boards though...
 
I have a 6600gt agp 1 gig of Patriot Ram, and a old pentium 4 2.6 (400)mhz fsb + AsRock p4v88+Mobo , but that mobo just crapped out on me after 7 months.. So i was about to buy a asrock939dual and a 3500+ venice, do you think this is a worthy upgrade? Or would you just buy another cheap p4 motherboard?
 
I love playing games like Fable and Unreal Tour 2004, i havent even Tried BF2 or WOW yet... would I see improvements and be able to run 1280x960 on High Details? :p If so, then im in for this combo right now. Also do you guys know if ASrock has some sort of warrenty on there intel boards? It was only 7 months of stock usage before it died.
 
Well, the 3500+ will make games perform much better than the P4 2.6GHZ. BUT, and here is the thing, a 6600GT is not the fastest card in the world. You might see a slight improvement and you might get the games a notch higher with the new processor, but don't expect miracles. It is, however, much faster overall compared to your 2.6GHZ Intel.

As a matter of fact, my second rig was a 2.6GHZ Intel on a P4P800 with 1GB mem and 6800gt. I just now switched to the ASRock board with a 3200+ (overclocked to 2.2GHZ, so 3500 speeds) and it sure as hell is much faster than the P4. But my 6800gt was held back by the Intel. I'm not sure if the 6600gt is held back as well.
 
Got mine setup and installing a fresh copy of windows XP as I missed something and my old install is borked :(

Couple of notes :

1. The IDE connectors are way down at the bottom, on my Antec Lanboy the CD-ROM in the top 5 1/4 slot couldn't reach, and moving it to the bottom slot caused problems cause the drive overlapped 2 DIMM slots.

2. There are only 2 free PCI's with my X800Pro + cooler. Expected though.

Other than that things are looking good. Hope to finish install tonight and get it OC'd some.
 
Got mine on thursday and was finally able to install today. Things i noticed:

As mentioned the connectors are on the bottom. What bugged me most was the location of the floppy connector. The whole lower right hand corner of the board is really cramped with connectors. Oh well, that's only an obstacle when putting it together, so it won't matter in everyday use.

Otherwise installation went without a hitch. Windows installed without problems, my memory runs with the correct timings at 1T as well.

Was able to overclock my Winchester 3200+ to 2.4GHZ without stability problems as well. Overall, this is a fantastic value.

AGP seems just as good as on the old intel chipset i had, with the added power of the AMD proc behind it.

Not bad at all for under $70!
 
Has nobody else noticed this problem?

Flip off the switch on the back of your PSU. Let it stand for 5-10 seconds or so to let it actually power off. Now flip it back on. You'll notice that it powers on your system for half a second, including hard drives and fans. This CANT be good for hard drives, can it? Moving parts starting and stopping within a second?

This problem has been confirmed by many other users on a 939Dual forum thread (different forums, I believe overclockers workbench).

Faulty circuitry?

Another problem I have with the board is that when I set RAM on Auto, it detects it as DDR233 instead of DDR400. This happens with both Corsair and Patriot RAM.

I am using bios 1.20.
 
I noiticed the power thing. However, i never use the main power button on the back, so it's no prob for me.

As far as the DDR333 setting: I can only imagine that it puts the 333 for compatibility. I simply manually set it to 400 and 1t timing and off it went.
 
does this board work well with 20 pin power supply connectors, or does it need a 24 pin?
 
zerogt86 said:
does this board work well with 20 pin power supply connectors, or does it need a 24 pin?
Click to expand...

I am using it with a 20pin PS no prob. Actually.. it only has a 20pin plug and not 24.
 
has anyone tried to OC any of those 939 opterons with this board yet? and also did someone think that chaintek was comming out with a board like this?
 
Volume said:
Another problem I have with the board is that when I set RAM on Auto, it detects it as DDR233 instead of DDR400. This happens with both Corsair and Patriot RAM.

I am using bios 1.20.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing it is doing the same thing that my Buffalo CH5 was doing, there are 2 sets of SPD settings on the ram and the ASRock board is just using the lowest setting for compatibility sakes.
 
I don't know if anyone has reviewed this board yet, but i figured i'd toss some pics up in case anyone was wondering what it looked like out of the box. I haven't been able to test it yet, waiting on my 3500 to get here, but so far so good, it came in great condition, it's a good looking board and it looks and feels of good quality. It feels nice, it's not flimsy everything is firmly attached, out of the box without being able to test it, I'd say I got more than I expected at this price point. I think the documentation is very good as well, I just flipped through the book and it explains everything in plain english, I didn't see any sloppy translations such as "Dual Channel DDR good put slot 2 color work same" like i've seen in others. :) All in all if this posts and runs stable, I think it's a helluva' deal.
939003.jpg


939004.jpg


939005.jpg
 
Does anyone know where to get the backplate for this board for the XP-90? I've got one coming and cant find the special backplate that it requires.

Thanks
 
Be sure to tell us how the AGP port works on this one! I've seen some pretty crappy implementations of AGP on PCIe motherboards before.

BTW, is that a CPU upgrade board slot like my K8Upgrade has on it? Does than mean there will be an M2 expansion card coming out for it? I think I've just found my next mobo :D
 
Unknown-One said:
Be sure to tell us how the AGP port works on this one! I've seen some pretty crappy implementations of AGP on PCIe motherboards before.

BTW, is that a CPU upgrade board slot like my K8Upgrade has on it? Does than mean there will be an M2 expansion card coming out for it? I think I've just found my next mobo :D
Click to expand...

Yes that is an upgrade slot....:) Will it be used for M2 expansion..I'm banking on it. :cool:
 
Unknown-One said:
Be sure to tell us how the AGP port works on this one! I've seen some pretty crappy implementations of AGP on PCIe motherboards before.

BTW, is that a CPU upgrade board slot like my K8Upgrade has on it? Does than mean there will be an M2 expansion card coming out for it? I think I've just found my next mobo :D
Click to expand...
The AGP slot works fine, comparable to the other 939/agp offerings as far as performance goes, there are plenty of reviews out there that attest to that.

Yes it is the upgrade slot for M2 when it is released.
 
Unknown-One said:
Be sure to tell us how the AGP port works on this one! I've seen some pretty crappy implementations of AGP on PCIe motherboards before.

BTW, is that a CPU upgrade board slot like my K8Upgrade has on it? Does than mean there will be an M2 expansion card coming out for it? I think I've just found my next mobo :D
Click to expand...
The AGP performance on this board seems identical to that of any other AGP board out there.
 
Anyone know if the Zalman CNPS7700-Cu will fit it? It's the 120mm deal, looks like it would be super tight.
 
threeclaws said:
The AGP slot works fine, comparable to the other 939/agp offerings as far as performance goes, there are plenty of reviews out there that attest to that.
Click to expand...
So we get a REAL AGP slot!? Coolies!

threeclaws said:
Yes it is the upgrade slot for M2 when it is released.
Click to expand...
Yay, this will most certainly be my next motherboard! :D
 
Unknown-One said:
So we get a REAL AGP slot!? Coolies!


Yay, this will most certainly be my next motherboard! :D
Click to expand...

Yep it isn't that AGP express BS that hinders performance :cool:
 
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