ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2: ULi Dual x16 SLI

Final Words

The ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 offers excellent performance and a wealth of features at a bargain price. The performance of the board in the majority of the benchmarks was extremely competitive with the ATI and NVIDIA chipset offerings. The stability of the board was superb with the production release BIOS at stock settings. We still find it surprising that a board with this feature set and performance is being offered for a retail price of US $85.

With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding this board.

In the video area, the inclusion of dual PCI Express x16 slots provides x16 SLI capability for half the price of the NVIDIA nForce4 x16 SLI chipset. The performance of the board under SLI testing was competitive with our nForce4 boards and offered full SLI compatibility when utilizing the ULi PowerExpress Engine Enabling driver. We tried this driver with the 81.85, 81.95, 81.98, and 82.12 drivers without an issue in a myriad of benchmarks and games. The board fully supported our ATI X1900XTX video card in limited testing. In fact, in discussions with the ULi engineers, we understood the next revision of the M1697 chipset would have offered full ATI CrossFire support with a similar PowerExpress Driver being offered. We doubt that this will occur now with ULi being fully owned by NVIDIA, but it certainly would have made this board even more desirable in the market place.

In the on-board audio area, the ASRock board offers the Realtek ALC-660 HD audio codec. While the ULi M1697 chipset fully supports 7.1 HD audio, ASRock provided 5.1 capability probably due to the implementation cost of the Realtek ALC-882. The audio output of this codec in the music, video, and DVD areas is very good for an on-board solution. The audio quality in gaming was good, but it did not match the output of the Sound Blaster X-FI. If you plan on utilizing this board for online gaming, then our recommendation is to purchase an appropriate sound card for consistency in frame rates across a wide range of games. However, the Realtek ALC-660 should suffice for the majority of users, and with constant driver updates, the performance will continue to improve.

In the storage area, the ASRock board offers the full complement of storage options afforded by the ULi M1697 chipset. The board offers RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, JDOB capability, NCQ, Hot Plug, eSATA, and 3Gb/s support along with dual channel ATA133 Ultra DMA capability. The board also offers eight ULi USB 2.0 ports when utilizing the two USB 2.0 headers and IEEE 1394 capability via the TI TSB43AB22 chipset. The performance of the ULi SATA and IDE controllers were excellent and easily exceeded the nForce4 solutions.

In the performance area, the ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 generated very good benchmark scores in most applications, considering the price of the board. The overall performance of the board in all areas was very competitive with boards costing significantly more. The stability of the board was excellent during testing and general usage. At stock speeds, there were no issues, but once we started overclocking the board, it became twitchy (due to limited voltage options) as we explored the limits of the board.

The ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 is a board designed and marketed for the AMD enthusiast on a budget, yet it excels in most areas. ASRock is the first manufacturer to market with the ULi M1695 and M1697 chipset combination, offering full dual x16 SLI capability along with the necessary driver patch to implement SLI operations although the board is not certified by NVIDIA. We applaud ASRock for the inclusion of dual x16 SLI capability on a value priced board and hope other board manufacturers can follow suit.

However, we feel that ASRock made the following errors in the design and execution of the board. The limited CPU and Memory voltages will hamper the marketability of this product into the AMD enthusiast community. When we utilized our Opteron 170 CPU, it was obvious that the board performed very well in overclocking situations where the CPU and Memory voltages were not a concern until reaching the limits of the CPU. While we understand the value nature of the board, the fact that it offers so many features and a fairly robust BIOS setup leads us to believe that the board's true performance potential will not be fully realized. However, even with additional voltage options this board was not designed for the hard-core overclocker.

Our other issues include the location of the floppy drive connector at the bottom of the board, the extremely tight clearance of IDE cables when utilizing an SLI setup, and the cooling capability of the heat sink on the ULi M1695 chipset. We also have to wonder about the inclusion of the AM2 CPU upgrade slot that seems more like a marketing gimmick than something that will be useful in the future. We certainly feel like the exclusion of this CPU upgrade slot would have afforded the opportunity to upgrade the already good 3-phase power delivery system, offering additional voltage settings, an additional slot space in between the PCI Express x16 connectors for custom video cooling solutions, and maybe the Realtek ALC-882 7.1 HD audio codec( we are being greedy now) at the same or slightly higher price point.

We believe that ASRock has done an incredible job in bringing a board with this feature set and performance to market at a very low price point. We feel that it is unfortunate that the ULi chipsets utilized on this board will probably have a limited life span in light of the NVIDIA acquisition, but are glad at this time to see more alternatives in the market place for the AMD enthusiast. The wide variety of alternatives now available in the market leads us to a difficult choice, but we believe this board offers the best overall combination of performance and features available on AMD motherboard under $100 at this time.