We have seen the ASrock K8 Combo-Z last week and found it to be a good upgradable board. ASrock K8 Upgrade-760GX brings you one more step closer to such a dream board with future upgrade by adding a daughter board. Interestingly enough, the board is based on the SIS 760GX chipset which includes a simple yet usable onboard graphics that could save you some money from purchasing a normal graphics card. Of course you can choose to pair it up with a high end nVIDIA or ATI graphics card for best 3D graphics performance.

When this board was first announced, many users speculated on the performance of such a design. Well, we have posted our findings and found that the board's performance is not that bad after all considering it runs exactly at 200.00MHz FSB. Like the ASrock K8 Combo-Z, we have to use a CAS 2 2.6v module to run the aggressive timings. Our Corsair XMS3500C2 didn't boot at CAS 2.

The BIOS options available are quite similar to that of ASrock K8 Combo-Z with the addition of setting the on board AGP size to share. In the BIOS, there are options of ASync 166,133,100 operation. HTT can be set and FSB ranges up to 300MHz. On the issue of PCI/AGP Fix, I have tested the board and it seems to hit the wall at 8 x 252MHz (max 300MHz) running async DDR333. This is when I lower the multiplier to 8 and increasing the FSB to 252 using an Athlon 64 3400+ CPU.

With the 939CPUBoard (daughter board), we plugged in a FX-53 processor and set the jumpers on board to support the Socket 939 CPU. Do take note about the jumper settings as it can be quite confusing as there is no indication of where is pin 1-2, 2-3 on the PCB. You might want to refer to the manual and use the extractor provided to remove the insert the jumpers to the correct positions.

In terms of features, this is the first board that supports the ASRock Future CPU Port: Socket939 upgrade interface for ASRock 939CPU Board, Integrateed. Mirage2 Graphics with DirectX8.1 support, AGP8X, Hybrid Booster, SerialATA 1.5Gb/s, RAID 0,1,JBOD, SATA_HDD Hotplug, USB2.0, 5.1channel Audio, 10/100 Ethernet LAN.

Overall, an upgradeable board with good performance and price. It is really the Best Cost/Performance AMD64 board.

Suggested Retail Price

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Pros

• Socket 754 with upgrade option to S939 thru daughter card
• Integrated graphics
• 8 X USB 2.0 

Cons

• No IDE RAID
• No Voltage selections
• Too many dip switches

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Best Cost/Performance AMD64 board