ASrock 939SLI32-eSATA2 is the first board that brings Dual 16x PCIe costs down for the mass market. The mainboard, which is based on a pair of M1695+M1697 chipsets has made it possible by enabling a feature set that was once dominated by the expensive boards.

The ASrock 939SLI32-eSATA2 not only brings Dual 16x PCIe for the masses, it also supports SLI, eSATA2 and AM2 future upgradability. On top of what the 939SLI-eSATA2 offers, it now even comes with GbE and 1394 support on board. The board comes with 2 PCIex16 slots which can work in either a single PCIe x16 or dual PCIex16 if a second card is plugged in. 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.

Similar to the 939SLI-eSATA2, it 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 as we test it using dual 7800GTX against the fatest NF4 SLI and NF4 SLIx16 board we tested before. In synthetic benchmarks, we can see that it loses out by 1%. This could be due to the fact that newer Forceware Drivers actually optimise it better for their graphics cards. In a seperate test, an ATi graphics card was used, and we noticed that the difference is closer.

Installation is quite straightforward for this board is simpler compared to 939SLI-eSATA2 as the jumpers are only meant for AM2 upgrade slot in the future. To run SLI, just insert a pair of NVIDIA SLI cards. With the PowerExpress Engine Enabling Driver and Forcware drivers, SLI works correctly without any issues at all. In SLI mode, we see that games like FEAR or Riddick, 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 7 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.

Overall, the board exhibits good feature set especially on the eSATA2, 1394, GbE, HD Audio,  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. This is definitely a high end board, with great features and at an affordable price that will eat into the marketshare of other brands.

Related Reviews 1
Related Reviews 2

Discuss in Forum