ASrock 939SLI-eSATA2 is the first board manufactured that supports the ULi M1697 single K8 chipset mainboard that comes with SLI, eSATA2 and AM2 future upgradability. This is what has taken everyone by surprise as it seems to be one of the most innovative designs at a good price/performance ratio.  The board comes with 2 PCIex16 slots which can be configured to work in a single PCIe x16 mode or Dual PCIe x8. The board also supports 4 ports of Serial ATA II 3.0Gb/s, RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD and RAID 5, and "Hot Plug" functions, and 2 ATA 133 IDE ports, 2 ports of eSATAII 3.0Gb/s (shared with 2 SATAII ports), support "Hot Plug" function. 5.1 Channel with High Definition Audio, 10/100 Ethernet LAN is supported. The board is also Windows Vista Hardware Ready ROHS compliant.

On top of all this, the 939SLI-eSATA2 also supports eSATA2 ports. This allows you to hook up eSATA2 enclosures which allows SATA HDD to be connected externally without compromising the speed in contrast to the lower performing USB or 1394 interfaces. In our previous review of another eSATA2 board, the 775XFire-eSATA2, we have tested and seen the goodness of eSATA2, you can click here to find out the performance levels against the normal USB enclosures.

Performance levels are amazing. In some tests, it even overtakes or on par with NF4 SLI board. The SLI mode is also stable and workable using any Forceware drivers (we used 81.98). Although we see that benchmarks like 3Dmark03/05 seems to perform better on the NF4 SLI board, it seems to be the tradition that NV has the know how on how to boost their performance numbers when paired with their own cards. When we used some actual games to test the performance levels. e.g FEAR or Riddick, we see that the performance level did not differ by a lot. For performance of USB and SATA II, you can refer to these USB & SATA II benchmarks of ULi M1697.

In our tests to push for high CLK, we were able to achieve 6 x 340MHz on our FX-53 processor. Voltages used are Vcore-1.55v, Vdimm=2.80, Vchipset=2.10v, ASync mem=DDR266, HT set to 400MHz.

Installation is quite straightforward for this board except that i really hate handling jumpers. The package is also quite simple but provided a jumper level for easy extraction of the jumpers. A SLI bridge is also provided in the package.

Overall, the board exhibits good feature set especially on the eSATA and AM2 upgradability. The SLI feature is also useful for those who wants to run SLI on it. The only regret is the exclusion of a active heatsink as it is quite warm to touch. 1394 and GbE might be good to be included but that will surely add up to the costs for features that not the masses will use. A good board to keep based on last chispet from ULi.

Related Reviews 1
Related Reviews 2

Discuss in Forum